Examining Associations between School Connectedness and Mental Health in Black Adolescents

Background: Schools are a critical developmental context for adolescents, where youth begin to explore their social worlds outside of their homes and families for the first time. School connectedness, generally defined as youths’ feelings of belonging or connection toward their schools, teachers, and peers, is positively associated with adolescents’ mental health. However, evidence also suggests that Black adolescents are less likely to report feeling like they belong in or are connected to their schools and are, therefore, at increased risk for experiencing adverse psychological outcomes.

Purpose: In this study, we explore the association between school connectedness and mental health in Black adolescents. Specifically, we focus on adolescents’ experiences of depression and aggressive behaviors. In addition, because much prior work suggests that girls and boys express mental health issues in very different ways, with boys being more likely to present with aggressive behavior problems and girls being more likely to present with depressive symptoms, we examine whether gender moderates the associations between school connectedness and youth mental health.

Methods: We take advantage of longitudinal data from the Future of Families and Child Well-Being Study, a population-based birth cohort study of 5000 children born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000 and followed at ages 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15. Our analyses are based on a sample of approximately 1700 Black adolescents who were interviewed at the 9 and 15-year follow-up waves. We measure school connectedness (4 items from the PSID-CDS-III) based on youth-reports at year 9, and mental health is based on youth-reported depression (5 items from the CES-D) and parent-reported aggressive behaviors (11 items from the CBCL) at year 15. We estimate linear regression models of the associations of school connectedness with mental health outcomes, controlling for a rich set of child, family, and school-level factors, and then include interaction effects between school connectedness and youth gender.

Results: We find that school connectedness (at year 9) was associated with lower levels of youth depression and aggressive behavior problems (at year 15) for all children. Our interaction models suggest that the protective association of school connectedness with depression, while present for both boys and girls, is much stronger for girls. On the other hand, we find no differences by youth gender in the association of school connectedness and aggressive behavior problems.

Discussion: The findings of this study provide further evidence that school connectedness is a key factor for promoting Black adolescents’ mental health. Notably, the current study is among the first to show that adolescents’ reports of school connectedness in middle childhood are related to their mental health in adolescence. Further, school connectedness appears to be particularly protective for girls’ reports of depression. Our findings have implications for school practices and policies related to Black adolescents’ experiences in their schools.