Student mental health and relationships with teachers and peers: Unravelling their interplay.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the key role of social relationships for children’s and adolescents’ mental health. Hence, promoting positive relationships may be a low-threshold, yet crucial lever for the prevention of youth mental problems in the pandemic’s aftermath. This project focuses on social relationships at school. More specifically, it digs into the understudied interplay among different dimensions of teacher-student and peer relationships in early adolescence, and their links with students’ mental (ill-)health, by addressing two main research objectives: (1) to investigate the unique and joint effects of different dimensions of teacher-student relationships and peer relationships on different student mental health outcomes, (2) to unravel the interplay among teacher-student relationships and peer relationships. The project comprises two longitudinal studies in grade 4-6 of elementary school (Study 1: N=1051, Study 2, N=1200) and an experimental study in pre-service teacher training (Study 3: N=320). Data for Study 1 and 2 are available from the start; Study 3 will be conducted during the project. Instruments consist of validated student and teacher reports, peer nominations, and observations. State-of-the-art techniques for analyzing longitudinal and hierarchical data and for experimental data will be used.