THE RELATIONSHIP OF ACADEMIC STRESSORS AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING AMONG CHINESE ADOLESCENTS: THE BUFFERING EFFECTS OF SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL SKILLS — AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS BASED ON SSES 2019

Abstract

This is a cross-sectional study based on data of 15-year-group from Suzhou China in Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) 2019 of OECD. It aims to fill in the research gap whether and how social and emotional skills protect adolescents’ mental health and well-being from academic stressors. By examining the mediating effects of social and emotional skills on the relationship between academic stressors and subjective well-being, this study desires to add empirical evidence to Wheaton’s (1985) additive stress-buffering model, which is the theoretical framework for the mediation models presenting how the five domains of social and emotional skills act to buffer the impact of academic stressors. The Big Five Model was employed as the assessment framework of social and emotional skills. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique was implemented to perform the mediation analysis using Mplus version 8.3. The results demonstrated that four domains of Chinese adolescents’ social and emotional skills- Collaboration (COL), Engaging with others (EWO), Open-mindedness (OPN) and Task performance (TAP) significantly mediated the impact of academic stressors (external expectations) on subjective well-being. The expectation stressors positively predicted the four social and emotional skills, and these skills in turn, positively impacted on subjective well-being. The direct effect of academic stressors of external expectations on wellbeing is negative but non-significant. As such, the stress-buffering function of the mediating effects of the four social and emotional skills was not confirmed. Nevertheless, the results provide evidence for the coping resources mobilization theory, alternatively, academic stressors mobilize social and emotional skills (COL, EWO, OPN and TAP). This is the most crucial premise to prove additive stress-buffering effect. Compared with COL, EWO, OPN and TAP, the Chinese adolescents were much less confident in their emotional regulation (EMR) skill, thus Chinese policymakers and educators should pay more attention to that. Among the three control variables, gender was the only variable that had significant confounding effects on subjective well-being in all the five models, as a negative predictor, which means Chinese girls had lower level of subjective well-being.