The Influence of After-School Activity Participation and Social-Emotional Skills on Psychological Well-Being Among Adolescents: Findings from Three Cities Participating in the OECD SSES 2019
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Abstract
Psychological well-being (PWB) in adolescents is a crucial factor in predicting long-term mental health and academic achievement. Adolescents with high PWB exhibit positive emotions and stress resilience during their learning journey. This boosts their self-confidence and helps them achieve their life goals. Although school-based curricula are known to foster PWB, less attention has been directed toward understanding the combined influence of after-school activities and social-emotional skills in shaping adolescents’ PWB. There are many types of after-school activities ranging from solo activities to socially engaging activities. Socially engaging after-school activities provide opportunities for family communication, social participation, as well as collaborations among families, peer groups, and communities within diverse cultural and social environments. Social-emotional skills are competencies that form foundations of interpersonal communication and relationship building. These skills help foster family interactions and social connections, which may be associated with better PWB. This study examines the multivariate relationships among social-emotional skills, time spent in after-school activities, and PWB using 2019 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) dataset from three participating cities, namely Daegu (South Korea), Istanbul (Turkey), and Suzhou (China). The inclusion of feedback from adolescents from selected cities provides diverse sociocultural contexts for examining the associations among adolescents’ social-emotional skills, activity participation, and PWB. Specifically, Ordinal Logistic Regression (OLR) is first used to investigate the relation between social-emotional skills and after-school activities. Correlational analysis was used to examine the relationship between after-school activities and adolescents’ PWB. Building on these analyses, Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) are then employed to investigate the association between social-emotional skills and time spent in after-school activities in predicting adolescents’ PWB. Findings reveal that Energy, Sociability, Curiosity, and Empathy are the primary influences on participation in after-school activities. Furthermore, physical and family-based after-school activities correlated positively with PWB. Importantly, the GAM combining social-emotional skills and after-school activities best predicts PWB, with an Adjusted R2 of 0.506. These findings contribute to the adolescent development literature by highlighting how social-emotional skills and after-school activities jointly support PWB within diverse sociocultural contexts.
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