Articlehybrid2023

Mental health and loneliness in Scottish schools: A multilevel analysis of data from the health behaviour in school‐aged children study

Claire Goodfellow · Malachi Willis · Jo Inchley · Kalpa Kharicha · Alastair H. Leyland · Pamela Qualter +2 more

13 citations0/0 files storedBritish Journal of Educational Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Health disparities and outcomes Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development School Health and Nursing Education

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Adolescent loneliness and poor mental health represent dual public health concerns. Yet, associations between loneliness and mental health, and critically, how these associations vary in school settings are less understood. AIMS: Framed by social-ecological theory, we aimed to identify key predictors of adolescent mental health and examine school-level variation in the relationship between loneliness and mental health. SAMPLE: Cross-sectional data on adolescents from the 2018 wave of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study (HBSC) in Scotland were used (N = 5286). METHODS: Mental health was measured as a composite variable containing items assessing nervousness, irritability, sleep difficulties and feeling low. Loneliness was measured via a single item assessing how often adolescents felt 'left out'. Multilevel models were used to identify social-ecological predictors of mental health, associations with loneliness and between-school variation. RESULTS: Loneliness, as well as demographic, social and school factors, was found to be associated with mental health. Mental health varied across schools, with the between-school difference greater among adolescents with high levels of loneliness. Additionally, the negative effect of loneliness on mental health was stronger in schools with lower average mental health scores. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that schools can play an important role in shaping adolescent mental health. Our study uniquely identifies that school-based interventions targeting mental health may be especially necessary among lonely adolescents, and programmes aimed at tackling loneliness may be more beneficial in schools with poorer mental health.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

References

1988The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support 1992Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice 2015Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality 1996UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3): Reliability, Validity, and Factor Structure 1980The revised UCLA Loneliness Scale: Concurrent and discriminant validity evidence.1990Psychometric Characteristics of the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support 2005Making human beings human : bioecological perspectives on human development 2020Rapid Systematic Review: The Impact of Social Isolation and Loneliness on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in the Context of COVID-19

Cited by

2024Nature-based therapy in Botswana and Scotland: Re-imagining social work for the climate crisis

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.