Neighborhood disadvantage, household chaos, and personal stressors: exploring early-life contextual factors and current mental health symptoms in college students

Abstract

Objective

Using Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological model as a frame, we explored the impact of neighborhood disadvantage, household chaos, and personal stressors on current mental health symptoms in college students.

Participants

144 students at a large, public university in the southern U.S.

Methods

Participants completed measures of demographics, family-of-origin household chaos, stressors, anxiety, and depression, and provided their childhood home ZIP code. Using U.S. Census Data, four structural indicators of neighborhood disadvantage were extracted and appended to each participant’s ZIP code.

Results

Hierarchical regression revealed that all three variables predicted anxiety symptoms. However, only household chaos and personal stressors predicted current depressive symptoms. Unexpectedly, greater neighborhood disadvantage predicted lower levels of current anxiety. Mediation analyses demonstrated that personal stressors partially mediated the relationships between household chaos and mental health symptoms.

Conclusions

College administration and counseling centers may wish to consider pre-college factors that influence college students’ current anxious and depressive symptoms.

Keywords:

• Family-of-origin
• household chaos
• mental health
• neighborhood disadvantage
• stressors

Acknowledgments

The idea for this paper originated from the dissertation completed by the third author, Dr. Rachel Hoadley-Clausen, at the University of South Alabama.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of the United States of America and received approval from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Funding

No funding was used to support this research and/or the preparation of the manuscript.