Adolescent Mental Health in Relation to the Factors of Social Ecosystem

Abstract

The main objective of the present study was to explore the relationship between Adolescent’s mental health with the social ecosystem. The specific objective was to explore whether the subsystems of the social ecosystem, i.e., microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem have a variation on adolescents’ mental health. The study also explores whether the elements of the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem have a variation on adolescents’ mental health. The participants of the present study were the adolescents of Dhaka city in Bangladesh. The sample comprised 400 (four hundred) adolescents; those were obtained from different schools of Dhaka city. A three-stage stratified random sampling technique was followed to collect data. Adapted Bangla version of the Mental Health Inventory-38 (Veit and Ware, 1983) and a developed Bangla version of the Social Ecosystem Scale was used. The mean, standard deviation, correlation, multiple and step-wise regression were computed. The results indicated that adolescent mental health is significantly correlated (r=.603, p1lt;.001) with the social ecosystem. Results of regression analysis indicated that the strongest predictor of mental health was microsystem, which alone explained 31.7% of the variance. R² change indicated that 10.6% of variance by the macrosystem, 2.4% of variance by the exosystem, 3.1% of variance by the mesosystem, and 2.7% of the variance in mental health was accounted by the chronosystem. The results further indicated that these five factors jointly account for 50.6% of the variance in mental health.