The Estimated Impacts of Perceived Prejudice and School Connectedness on Depression Among US Chinese and Filipino Youth

Background and Purpose: Perceived prejudice due to unfair treatment from peers and teachers at school are potential risk factors for depression in ethnic minority youth. Studies have explored the dynamics of perceived prejudice and depression in Asian American youth. Negative perceptions of school environment may hinder feelings of social belonging and competence, thereby causing adverse mental health outcomes. However, research on mental health in Asian Americans has usually treated Asian Americans as a collective, overlooking important ethnic and cultural differences in Asian subgroups. The purpose of this study was to investigate the longitudinal dynamics of depression and school context for Chinese and Filipino with a focus on understanding how, for each group, school connectedness and perceived prejudice from peers and teachers as measured during adolescence are associated with depressive symptoms during adolescence and how these effects persist into early young adulthood, and young adulthood.

Methods: The data for this study come from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (Add health).  Add Health is a nationally representative, school-based study with a sample of more than 20,000 adolescents in Grades 7 to 12.  The current study used a subsample of Chinese and Filipino American youth who completed interviews during adolescence, six years after that, and again six years after that.  A total of 322 Chinese Americans and 651 Filipino Americans were analyzed. Constructs were measured by: 1) a short version of 9-item CES-D scale for depression; 2) three items on students’ general feelings of school connectedness; and 3) adolescents’ perceived discrimination at school, such as whether students at school were characterized as being prejudiced and the extent to which teachers treat students fairly.  The study used multi-group structural equation modeling (SEM) for data analysis.  

Results: A good model fit for the global fit indices of the SEM model was observed (χ²=15.418, p>0.05; RMSEA < 0.001; CFI=1.000 ; SRMR= 0.029; P-value for the test of close fit=0.933) and the focused fit indices also were good.  The model indicated that there was a link between school connectedness and depression during adolescence and that this persisted into early young adulthood and young adulthood. There also was a statistically significant path coefficient between perceived prejudice from teachers and school connectedness for both Chinese and Filipino groups. All of these estimated effects maintained in the presence of a large number of covariates. Comparisons of the magnitude of effects across the two Asian subgroups were explored, using scaled chi square difference tests between an unconstrained model and a constrained model. The differences between the two solutions were not significant, indicating that the estimated impacts of school contexts on depressive symptoms for Chinese American youth were comparable to those for Filipino American youth.

Implications: Findings of this study suggest that the estimated effects of school contexts during adolescence can be influential on depressive symptoms for both Asian subgroups and that these effects extend out some 12 years later. The results provide important implications for social work education and practice in disparities in mental health among Asian American youth.