School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. Singapore, Singapore.
PLoS One. 2023 Dec 11;18(12):e0294591. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294591. eCollection 2023.
Research on the bidirectional relationship between social connectedness and health/mental health in adolescents is scarce, with most studies on adults. Some of the existing studies exploited the availability of longitudinal data to provide evidence of the existence of a causal relationship, either from social connectedness to health or establish a bidirectional relationship. There are at least two weaknesses associated with earlier research to assess the size of the effects. As acknowledged in the literature, one relates to attributing causality to empirical findings, due to well-known but inadequately addressed endogeneity biases. The other relates to failure to account for potentially important covariates, sometimes due to data limitations, or because such variables are not frequently used in sociological research. Existing research predominantly finds that the strongest path is from social connectedness to health/mental health, with effect estimates modest in size. I followed a quasi-experimental strategy by modelling adolescent students' perceptions of social connectedness and mental health perceptions as potentially endogenous variables when estimating bidirectional effects. An instrumental variables (IV) modelling approach was followed, supplemented with a recently developed alternative approach to testing the exclusion restrictions of individual instruments. I exploited the rich information available in the PISA 2018 multi-country dataset, which allows for conditioning for a wide array of information on adolescent students' personal circumstances, self-reported personality-related attributes, relationships with parents; and school characteristics. I found that (1) accounting for endogeneity biases is important; and (2) as opposed to findings reported in the literature, the dominant effect is from mental health perceptions to social connectedness for both male and female participants. The policy relevance of the findings is that adolescent mental health should be the primary focus of interventions, i.e., identifying and treating mental health symptoms as a primary intervention and as a precursor to improving the social connectedness of adolescents.
青少年社会联系与健康/心理健康之间的双向关系研究相对较少，大多数研究都是针对成年人的。一些现有的研究利用纵向数据提供了因果关系存在的证据，无论是从社会联系到健康，还是建立双向关系。早期研究在评估影响大小方面至少存在两个弱点。正如文献中所承认的，一个弱点与将因果关系归因于实证发现有关，这是由于存在众所周知但未得到充分解决的内生性偏差。另一个弱点与未能考虑潜在的重要协变量有关，有时是由于数据限制，或者因为这些变量在社会学研究中不常使用。现有的研究主要发现，从社会联系到健康/心理健康的最强路径是存在的，其效应估计适度。我采用了一种准实验策略，在估计双向效应时，将青少年学生对社会联系和心理健康的感知建模为潜在的内生变量。我采用了工具变量（IV）建模方法，并辅以最近开发的一种替代方法来测试个别工具的排除限制。我利用了 PISA 2018 多国家数据集提供的丰富信息，该数据集允许对青少年学生的个人情况、自我报告的与人格相关的属性、与父母的关系以及学校特征等方面的广泛信息进行条件处理。我发现：（1）考虑内生性偏差很重要；（2）与文献中的发现相反，对于男性和女性参与者，主要效应是从心理健康感知到社会联系。这些发现的政策相关性在于，青少年心理健康应该成为干预的重点，即识别和治疗心理健康症状作为主要干预措施，并作为改善青少年社会联系的前提。
