Influence of the Psychosocial School Environment on Adolescents’ Mental Health, Wellbeing, and Loneliness: Impact of a Psychosocial School Programme and Other Factors

This PhD project is designed to study factors in the psychosocial school environment that may help prevent mental problems, loneliness and promote wellbeing among students in upper secondary school in Norway. This topic has been approached in two ways: First, by examining the longitudinal relationships between students’ perceptions of the psychosocial classroom environment and school loneliness (Article I). Second, through evaluating the effectiveness of the psychosocial school programme VIP partnership on students’ perceptions of the social classroom environment (Article II), self-reported internalizing problems, happiness, and loneliness (Article III). The latter paper also examined whether students’ baseline level of social anxiety moderated the programme’s effectiveness. Student data were collected after one week, 10 weeks and six months into the school year 2017/18, by means of electronic self-reporting questionnaires administered in school classes. A quasi-experimental test-control group design was employed, and the sample comprised 3,155 first-year students at 17 upper secondary schools in Norway. In addition, teacher data were collected to assess programme fidelity. The key findings of Article I were that that students’ school loneliness was uniquely and strongly predicted by their experience of the social classroom environment, and that perceptions of emotional and instrumental support from teachers did not significantly predict this outcome. Overall, these results indicate that the peersetting within the school context is particularly important for adolescents’ socioemotional functioning. The main finding in Article II was that participation in VIP partnership was associated with more positive perceptions of the social classroom environment in five of the ten test schools (d = .19–.51), and that the effectiveness on this variable appeared to depend on the number of years teachers had used the programme. These results may indicate that the effects of the programme on this outcome is related to the implementation timeframe. Next, the findings of Article III suggested that participation in VIP partnership was associated with higher levels of happiness (d = .12), and lower internalizing problems in the subgroups with no (d = .30) and low (d = .14), but not high, social anxiety symptoms at baseline. No significant effects were found for loneliness at posttest or for any outcome measure at six-month follow-up. These results suggest that the overall effectiveness of VIP partnership on these outcomes is temporary and limited. These somewhat modest findings from Article III are largely consistent with results from other environment-based, universal school programmes for mental health, and should be seen in the context of a range of potentially moderating factors related to the type of intervention (universal), the complexity of the outcome phenomena and the school context, as well as various methodological features. Importantly, qualitative data from teachers indicated that many experienced the programme as positive because they believed it provided the students with various social opportunities. In this sense, the study results can be taken to indicate that one should possibly reduce the expectations of achieving considerable effects from the programme on students’ mental health and loneliness and focus as much on the potential intrinsic value of the programme