Original title: Neighbourhood and school predictors of adolescent internalising symptoms and wellbeing: a scoping review
The review gathers quantitative studies of how schools and neighbourhoods relate to mental health and wellbeing in people aged 10–19. Across 269 studies, school settings were much more common than neighbourhood settings or studies of both together. Most studies focused on social relationships and mental health difficulties, especially depression. Long-term and multi-setting analyses were less common, making it harder to understand how these environments shape young people over time.
Imagine trying to work out why a student is often tired by checking their school day and the area around their home. If you mostly ask about school, you may miss what happens in the neighbourhood, or how both places affect the student together. In this paper, the school and neighbourhood are the two settings being examined, and the review shows that research has focused much more on the school setting.
Schools and neighbourhoods both shape teenagers’ daily lives, so prevention efforts may miss important influences if researchers study one setting far more than the other. The review shows where evidence is thin, especially for wellbeing and for how the two settings interact.
The review maps quantitative studies published since 2015, so it does not establish that school or neighbourhood factors cause particular outcomes. The abstract reports limited evidence about wellbeing and about neighbourhood or joint-context influences, and says that infrequent longitudinal and multilevel analyses restrict understanding of developmental processes and shared contexts.
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Neighbourhood and school predictors of adolescent internalising symptoms and wellbeing: a scoping review — Kathryn Mills-Webb, Emma Thornton, Michael Wigelsworth et al. — BMC Public Health — doi:10.1186/s12889-026-29462-y
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.