Socioeconomic Status and Students’ Mental Health during the COVID-19 University Closure: Mediating Roles of Perceived Social Support and Self-Efficacy

Author:

Huang Liang1ORCID,Wang Dongsheng2ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Public Administration, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China

2. Faculty of Education, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China

Abstract

Despite the need for urgent actions in response to the exacerbated inequalities in mental health resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, there remains a significant gap in research into the relationships and underlying mechanisms between socioeconomic status (SES) and various mental health outcomes among students during the COVID-19 university closure. With a sample of 839 students from a university in Lanzhou, the capital city of China’s Gansu Province, which was closed during the 2022 autumn semester due to the COVID-19 outbreak, this study examined the relationships between SES and both the negative and positive mental health outcomes, with a particular inquiry into the mediating roles of perceived social support and self-efficacy. The results show that SES had significant and negative total associations with psychological distress (β = −0.119, p < 0.001) and loneliness (β = −0.132, p < 0.001), while having significant and positive total associations with life satisfaction (β = 0.90, p < 0.01) and affective well-being (β = 0.108, p < 0.01). Moreover, perceived social support and self-efficacy independently and sequentially mediated the associations between SES and various mental health outcomes. Research implications for the design and improvement of university measures to reduce the socioeconomic inequalities in students’ mental health are also discussed.

Funder

Zhishan Scholarship

Publisher

MDPI AG

Subject

Behavioral Neuroscience,General Psychology,Genetics,Development,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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