BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Indirect Association Between Military-Specific School Supports and Internalizing Symptoms Through School Belonging in Military-Connected Children

Thu, April 8, 11:45am to 12:45pm EDT (11:45am to 12:45pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

Introduction
Past research has demonstrated that school belonging is a positive predictor of children’s psychosocial outcomes (Lucktong et al., 2017). There is also evidence that efforts by schools to provide social and emotional support to children can enhance their psychosocial functioning (Chen et al., 2017). Students who are military-connected (MC) often face significant stressors, which could explain their tendency to experience more internalizing symptoms and lower school belonging than non-MC children (DePedro, 2015).
Unclear from this research is whether military-specific school support (MSSS) is also linked to school belonging or internalizing symptoms for children from military families. We posited that school belonging would mediate associations between MSSS and children’s internalizing symptoms in a sample of MC children.

Method
Participants were 240 MC students (45% male) in 3rd or 5th grade participating in a longitudinal study. At Time 1, we measured school belonging (Psychological Sense of School Membership; Goodenow, 1993), internalizing symptoms (internalizing subscale of Behavior and Feelings Survey; Weisz et al., 2019), and the extent to which children experience MSSS using a subscale of a measure developed for this study.

Results
As expected, children’s experience of MSSS was significantly positively related to their school belonging. School belonging was also significantly negatively associated with internalizing symptoms (Table 1). However, contrary to expectations, children’s experience of MSSS was significantly positively related to their internalizing symptoms.
We then tested whether school belonging mediated the association between MSSS and internalizing symptoms (Figure 1). School support was a significant positive predictor of school belonging (β = .13, t(238) = 2.92, p < .01), and school belonging was a significant negative predictor of internalizing symptoms (β = -.42, t(674) = -3.59, p < .001). The total effect of MSSS on internalizing symptoms was significant (β = .17, t(237) = 2.04, p < .05), but revealed a suppression effect in that, after controlling for school belonging, the magnitude of the prediction between MSSS and internalizing symptoms increased. (β = .23, t(237) = 2.72, p < 0.01). Using 5000 bootstrapped samples and 95% confidence intervals, the standardized indirect effect of MSSS on internalizing symptoms through school belonging was significant (β = -.06, SE = 0.03, 95% CI = -0.11, -0.01).

Discussion
Our results indicate that students who receive more MSSS feel more connected to school, and that students who feel more connected experience fewer internalizing symptoms. However, students who experienced more MSSS reported more internalizing symptoms. We found evidence for an indirect effect of school belonging on internalizing symptoms, suggesting that school belonging may serve as a protective factor. These findings suggest the possibility that children’s internalizing symptoms are driving their level of involvement in MSSS. The possibility that students who seek school support tend to be those in greater need is consistent with the cross-sectional nature of our data and with an earlier study finding that students who use school supports reported more socioemotional problems (Niehaus & Adelson, 2014). We plan to subsequently examine the associations among these constructs prospectively.

Group Authors

McMillan, H.T., Steggerda, J.C., Cavell, T.A., Slep, A., Herrera, C., Spencer, R.

Authors