Department of Social Work, Umeå University, and Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR), Umeå University, Sweden.
Soc Sci Med. 2021 Feb;270:113616. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113616. Epub 2020 Dec 16.
Increasing mental health problems among adolescents have been have reported in several countries over the last decades. Yet, little is known regarding the societal changes underlying secular trends in adolescent mental health. The educational stressors hypothesis states that educational expansion and a shift to knowledge economies makes life chances of adolescents more dependent on their educational performance, thus generating more school stress and, in turn, mental health problems. The present study tests this hypothesis using multilevel analyses and panel data techniques to analyse data from the Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey, including more than 150,000 adolescents in 33 European countries over 12 years. Results show that economic change, as measured by changes in national gross domestic product, but not educational expansion, contributes to more school stress in adolescents. Both economic change and educational expansion makes school stress more consequential for mental health problems, such that the effect of stress on mental health problems becomes stronger as countries grow richer and more educated. I conclude that, consistent with the educational stressors hypothesis, economic change and educational expansion has likely contributed to increasing mental health problems in adolescents.
过去几十年，许多国家都报告称青少年的心理健康问题日益增多。然而，对于青少年心理健康的世俗趋势背后的社会变化，人们知之甚少。教育压力假说指出，教育扩张和向知识型经济的转变使青少年的生活机会更多地依赖于他们的教育表现，从而产生更多的学校压力，并进而导致心理健康问题。本研究使用多层次分析和面板数据技术来检验这一假说，分析了来自青少年健康行为调查（HBSC）的超过 15 万名 33 个欧洲国家的青少年 12 年的数据。研究结果表明，以国内生产总值变化衡量的经济变化，而不是教育扩张，导致青少年的学校压力更大。经济变化和教育扩张都使学校压力对心理健康问题的影响更为重要，因此，随着国家变得更加富裕和教育水平提高，压力对心理健康问题的影响变得更强。我得出结论，与教育压力假说一致，经济变化和教育扩张可能导致青少年心理健康问题的增加。
