Neighbourhood and school predictors of adolescent internalising symptoms and wellbeing: a scoping review

Abstract Background Addressing declines in adolescent mental health and wellbeing is a major public health concern. Understanding the influence of, and interactions between, key developmental contexts is essential to inform effective policy and prevention efforts. During adolescence, the school an adolescent attends and the neighbourhood they live in are two fundamental developmental systems and could be important predictors of mental health and wellbeing outcomes. However, the evidence base about school and neighbourhood determinants is siloed, focused primarily on psychopathology, and dominated by research on a narrow range of school and neighbourhood influences. Methods This scoping review maps quantitative evidence about the effect of school and neighbourhood environments, both separately and in tandem, on mental health difficulties (depression, anxiety, internalising symptoms) and wellbeing outcomes (psychological wellbeing, life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect) among adolescents aged 10–19 years. Following Joanna Briggs Institute guidance for scoping reviews and PRISMA guidelines for reporting, six databases (e.g., ERIC, PsycINFO) were searched for studies published since 2015. Data from 269 studies were synthesised using thematic and methods-oriented approaches. Results Findings indicate that across both school and neighbourhood studies, a wide range of factors have been researched, however the focus is predominantly on social-relational factors, and skewed towards the school context (73.2%) compared to studies about the neighbourhood environment (14.5%) and studies about both contexts (12.3%). Most studies investigated mental health outcomes (72.9%), and the most researched outcome was depression, with limited evidence about other mental health and wellbeing outcomes Longitudinal (29.0%), multilevel (26.8%; cross-classified, 1.5%) and pathway (16.0%) analyses were relatively infrequent, limiting understanding about developmental processes and the influence of shared contexts. Conclusions Knowledge about which – and how – factors within the school and neighbourhood environments predict and/or exert influence (both positively and negatively) on adolescent mental health and wellbeing outcomes is essential for successful prevention. The findings of this review highlight broad and wide-ranging limitations in the evidence base which are fundamentally hindering our understanding. Addressing these gaps is essential to identify modifiable risk and protective factors in school and neighbourhood settings.