key: cord-1033534-6qmtmult authors: Shukla, Meenakshi; Wu, Alison F.W.; Lavi, Iris; Riddleston, Laura; Hutchinson, Taryn; Lau, Jennifer Y.F. title: A network analysis of adolescent mental well-being during the coronavirus pandemic: Evidence for cross-cultural differences in central features date: 2021-10-06 journal: Pers Individ Dif DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2021.111316 sha: 5c0f1822df31cc00ac297610941faec4f07fd64a doc_id: 1033534 cord_uid: 6qmtmult The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose unprecedented threat globally. Adolescents and youth may be especially susceptible to the long-term impact of these stressors, thus intervening early is an important priority. However, it is also crucial to understand how young people maintain psychological well-being in the face of adversity, particularly given that many nations are experiencing further waves of the pandemic. The understanding of such resilient outcomes could inform the development of programs to encourage positive mental health.We explored adolescents' resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic stress by examining core aspects of well-being across countries using network analysis. Using the short Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, cross-sectional data was collected online from adolescents from India (N = 310; Males = 159, Females = 151, aged 12–18), Israel (N = 306; Males = 154, Females = 152, aged 12–18) and the United Kingdom (UK; N = 1666; Males = 598, Females = 1068, aged 12–25). Two highly similar network clusters were identified for UK and Israel, with three clusters emerging for India. UK and Israeli networks centred on “dealing with problems well” while Indian centred on “feeling useful”. As central items highlight aspects of well-being that influence or are influenced by other aspects, these findings may inform interventions to safeguard adolescent mental health during future phases of the pandemic. culture-specific intervention strategies to protect young people against mental health problems in future phases of the pandemic or beyond. One approach to identifying core features of well-being is to use network analysis. Network analysis can represent the multi-component nature of constructs such as well-being through individual "nodes" (items within a well-being scale). It also captures the dynamics between these components, by linking nodes together through "edges" (partial correlations between items) (Kroeze et al., 2017) . Within the network, some nodes are more strongly related to one another than other items, and appear as "clusters" or sub-components. Each node can also be quantified through centrality indices; these inform the relative impact of that item on other items within the clusters and within the network more generally, such as its" capacity to influence or activate another item (Borgatti, 2005) . Identifying more central items could directly inform the targeting of these in interventions, reflecting a powerful way to enhance well-being. One well-researched measure of centrality is strength; the overall size of associations between an item and other items in the network. Using this approach, a prior study containing data from adults and young people in the UK identified positive selfperceptions (I have been feeling good about myself; I have been feeling confident) and positive mood (I have been feeling cheerful) as central items in well-being, with minimal age and gender effects (Stochl et al., 2018) . Somewhat replicating these Moreover, as there are only two studies, it is difficult to know the extent to which similarities and differences in results point to culturally-invariant "core" features (positive mood) and country-specific core features (positive self-perceptions, engagement). Indeed, prior studies show cross-country differences in the endorsement of coping strategies in maintaining well-being (See & Essau, 2010) . The present study aims to extend these findings. First, we explored the core aspects of adolescent well-being during the first lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (beginning June, 2020), using the array of challenges posed by the pandemic as a natural stressor to tap resilient responses. Second, as the sociocultural, socioeconomic and historical background of countries could pervade young peoples" strategies for maintaining well-being in challenging situations, we collected data from Israel and India, and benchmarked these against network analysis we had recently conducted on young people from a third country, the UK (Wu et al., under review). The number of coronavirus cases in India, the UK, and Israel at the start of data collection were 236,184, 186,860, and 17,071, respectively, and were 879,466, 1,702,087, and 116 , 596 respectively at the end of data collection. Based on the above rationale, we sought to address the following specific questions: We hypothesised that differences would be obtained in the network structure, items central to psychological well-being, as well as the clustering and centrality parameters of young people from India, Israel, and the UK. The study protocol for data collection across three sites was set up in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, utilising an online survey design to understand the emotional impact of the pandemic in young people. Inclusion criteria were being able to read questionnaires presented in the language of that country (Hindi, Hebrew, English), and aged 12-18 in the India and Israel studies, and aged 12-25 in the UK study. However, to enable cross-country comparisons, data from 12-18 year old UK participants were only included in this study. The India sample comprised 310 adolescents, identified by circulating the information about the survey through social media. Although all participants were Hindi-speaking Asian-Indians, the survey link along with information sheets and consent forms were available bilingually in Hindi and English and participants could choose between languages. Participants aged 18 years provided informed consent; online parental consent followed by verbal confirmation over the phone was required for those aged <18 years. The Israeli sample comprised 306 adolescents, the majority (N=286, 93.46%) of whom were enrolled in an Israeli survey company (iPanel) and received compensation for participation (about 5 shekels, an equivalent of 1.5 USD). of the remaining participants (N=20, 6.4%) were recruited through snowballing. Similar to the India sample, Israeli participants aged 18 years and over provided their own consent to participate while parents consented to the Indian youth. The UK and Israel are considered high-income countries but also historically to adopt more individualistic social values (Hofstede Insights, 2017) . Young people growing up in these countries are more likely to endorse independence over inter-dependence in their self-construals. Problem-solving and for UK participants only, clarity of thinking of the individual were identified as central (more influential) features of psychological well-being. In contrast, India, is considered a collectivist society where adolescents and young adults still live in joint-family systems (Mathur, 2018) . Their well-being was therefore more likely to be characterised by "feeling useful"-possibly manifesting through prosocial behaviour during the lockdown in terms of helping their family in household activities and finances (UNICEF India, 2020). This finding is consistent with that reported in an earlier study of well-being in another collectivist culture-China (Zeng et al., 2019), which showed that engagement (being useful) is an important component of well-being among Chinese adolescents. Further, the finding of no gender differences in the centrality of items is consistent with a previous study of well-being involving UK participants (Stochl et al., 2018) . Compared to studies conducted pre-pandemic which highlighted the centrality of positive affect in well-being networks (Stochl et al., 2019; Zeng et al., 2019) , our multi-national data collected during the pandemic indicated the centrality of not just affective but also cognitive components in well-being networks, depending upon culture. Our data also speak to some cultural differences in clusters of well-being items. Items clustering together in network analysis are more strongly inter-connected, which may mean they are activated together. The UK and Israel samples show two highly similar clusters. For the UK, cluster 1 reflected the affective component of well-being while cluster 2 reflected the cognitive aspect of well-being. Israeli participants show the J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof same clustering except for item 3-"feeling relaxed" which, unlike the UK sample, was in cluster 1. On the other hand, for India, three clusters were identified, where cluster 1 comprised items 1, 2 and 3; cluster 2 comprised items 4 and 5, while cluster 3 comprised items 6 and 7. Again, the cross-cultural differences in clustering of items could be explained by individualism-collectivism differences between countries. While all three countries showed two distinct clusters of affective and cognitive components of well-being, an additional cluster in India shows that collectivist cultures view decision making ("able to make up my own mind about things") as highly interconnected with "feeling close to other people". This suggests that in a collectivist culture decision making is not an individualistic task but is associated with having close relationships with others. This has previously been reported in collectivist cultures, where even dayto-day decision making involves others, while in individualistic cultures (such as UK and Israel), decision making is focussed on achieving personal goals rather than accommodating goals of others (Yates & de Oliveira, 2016) . This collectivist cultural practice of shared decision making may have heightened during the pandemic-related lockdown, where living in closer proximity than normal and the prevailing uncertainty may have lead to even small decisions involving other family members. Overall, the striking similarity in the item-clustering of well-being across the three countries suggests both universal and culture-specific aspects of well-being. There are several limitations to our findings. First, caution should be exercised in interpreting the centrality indices for the Israeli and the India sample, both of which show moderate levels of stability (.44) which fell slightly short of the recommended criteria of .50 (Epskamp et al., 2018) . Thus, the robustness of these findings need to be verified in future investigations. Relatedly, we relied on node strength as the measure of J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof centrality, but other measures such as closeness (an index of the lengths of paths from any one node in the network to itself; Costantini et al., 2015) and betweenness (the number of shortest paths passing through a specific node; Bringmann et al., 2019) can be used. By only using one index, some key features of the network might be lost (Martin, Zhang & Newman, 2014) . However, as these indices were not reliably estimated from the current dataset, they were not presented here. The present study utilised convenience sampling collected online, limiting generalisability of findings. Given that the study is cross-sectional, it is not possible to know whether the findings are truly indicative of well-being or resilience during the pandemic, as we did not have a pre-pandemic measurement of well-being. Another limitation is the use of a single, short measure of psychological well-being, which limits the extent to which different dimensions of well-being could be captured. Our findings ought to therefore be corroborated in future studies using multi-dimensional measures of well-being. Lastly, some generalizability and replicability issues in network analysis methodology have been reported (Forbes et al., 2017) and therefore caution needs to be exercised in interpreting and implementing the findings. Our findings concerning which aspects of well-being were considered most influential and connected with other aspects could have implications for identifying important intervention targets for designing interventions to increase resilience among young people. 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These findings also suggest that culture-type (individualistic vs. collectivistic) may have an important bearing on the key elements of resilience.Nevertheless, the present findings strongly support cross-cultural similarities in wellbeing structure rather than differences.