We’re excited to announce a recent team paper, based on interests from one of our former undergraduate scholars and other collaborators within and beyond the lab. This paper, titled “Social Support is Fundamentally Important for Mental Health among Adolescents and Emerging Adults: Evidence across Relationships and Phases of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, is in press at the Journal for Research on Adolescence and was authored by Alicia Mitchell (former undergrad scholar in the lab; current grad student in Education); Chloe Johnson (grad student in the lab), Emily Schroeder (grad student in the lab), and Dr. G Wei Ng (research collaborator with Our Minds Matter youth programming). This manuscript focuses on multiple groups of adolescents (i.e., middle and high school students) and emerging adults (i.e., traditional-age college students) to consider how feeling social supported by other people–family, friends, and other peers–is important for mental health.
- Social support involves the ways people feel a they are receiving enough care, respect, acceptance, and validation from others. Social spport can come from different relationships, like family and friends, as well as others at school and work. Social support fits with other theories about the kinds of opportunities and resources that are critical for healthy development, including having strong, trustworthy, and dependable relationships with other people.
Past work from our lab and from many other research teams has shown that social support is valuable for mental health and for other measures of well-being, and for teens and adults, support from both family and friends contributes to greater health. There is a strong argument that social support should be a fundamental resource–one that is applicable across different relationships, for people of different ages, and across different settings. We had an opportunity to address this question of social support being a “fundamental” resource using data collected from multiple groups of teens and adults both during major shutdowns and remote work of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the years following COVID shutdowns. We asked whether, time and again, social support would be related to fewer anxious and depressive problems, and related to greater coping resources.
We used survey responses from four “groups” of young people between 2020 and 2023: a) reports of social support and mental health from adolescents who were completing schoolwork remotely; b) reports of social support and coping from high school adolescents who had returned to completing school activities in-person; c) reports of social support and mental health from college adults who were completing college work remotely, even if living around the campus; and d) reports of social support and mental health from college adults who had returned to completing college activities in-person.
Time and again, we found that social support was related to fewer depressive and anxious problems and related to more coping resources among adolescents and young adults.
- This was supported with support from family, from close friends, and from other peers who were involved in similar activities (i.e., peers in Our Minds Matter high school clubs).
- Social support was related to other aspects of social functioning, but showed differences from other important measures like personality (i.e., trait agreeableness), reports of social behaviors (i.e., calling family or making new friends on the college campus), feeling like social motivation is being met, and viewing oneself as having more social success with relationships around campus (i.e., sense of college belonging).
- Further, the strength of the associations between social support and depression was consistent across different phases of COVID-19 impacts (i.e., remote living, returns to in-person activities).
This was further support that there was something fundamental and distinct about the values of social support for these different phases of development AND with the differences in people’s social environments given COVID impacts.
References and Additional Readings:
Booker, J. A., Hernandez, E., Talley, K. E., & Dunsmore, J. C. (2022). Connecting with others: Dispositional and situational relatedness during the college transition. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 39(2), 198–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075211034566
Mitchell, A., Johnson, C. L., Schroeder, E., Ng G. W., & Booker, J. A. (2024). Social support is fundamentally important for mental health among adolescents and emerging adults: Evidence across relationships and phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Manuscript in press at Journal for Research on Adolescence.
Wesley, R., & Booker, J. A. (2021). Social support and psychological adjustment among college adults. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 40(1), 69–95. https://doi.org/10/gj5gzs
The Milestones Lab at Mizzou 