Unequal Adolescence: How Do Achievement, Depression, and Their Relationship Differ between Disadvantaged and Advantaged Students?

• In Event: Supporting Academic and Social-Emotional Wellbeing of Students and Teachers: Cases from China

Proposal

How do family backgrounds – particularly family socioeconomic status (SES) and residential status (urban/rural) – affect students’ educational achievement and depression? Research to date often neglects the comparison of disadvantaged students’ disadvantage in educational achievement and their disadvantage in depression, the analysis of heterogeneity in the relationship between educational achievement and depression across different family backgrounds, and the consideration of various mechanisms linking educational achievement to depression for students with different family backgrounds.

To overcome these limitations, this study will investigate three main questions. First, is the gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students (measured by unit-free standard deviations) larger in educational achievement or in depression? Second, is the relationship between educational achievement and depression the same for disadvantaged and advantaged students, in terms of both direction and magnitude? Third, are the effect pathways linking educational achievement to depression through three key mechanisms – pressure from parents’ expectations, teachers’ criticism, and peers’ unfriendliness – the same for disadvantaged and advantaged students?

To answer these three questions, I employ structural equation modeling to analyze two waves of data from the China Educational Panel Survey (2013-2014 and 2014-2015). Results show that the inequality in educational achievement is larger than the inequality in depression. While it seems the negative relationship between educational achievement and depression could vary across family background, such evidence is too weak to be statistically significant. Finally, the three effect pathways linking educational achievement to depression – peers’ unfriendliness, teachers’ criticism, and pressure from parents – all hold for advantaged and disadvantaged students. But overall, the effect pathways tend to be stronger among advantaged than among disadvantaged students. Such results illuminate whether there are differences across family contexts in the degree to which the pursuit of educational achievement is linked to subsequent depression and how that link is established.

Author

• Wensong Shen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong