Mapping the Interconnected Landscape of Adolescent Psychosocial Health

Introduction: Adolescent psychosocial health refers to the ways emotional, somatic, and social experiences shape young people’s daily functioning. Yet little is known about how these elements co-occur within broader relational systems. To address this gap, we map the structure of psychosomatic complaints, perceived stress, anxiety, loneliness, well-being, self-rated health, and social support in a representative sample of adolescents. Methods: Using data from 6,857 participants in the 2022 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study in Luxembourg, we estimated sex-stratified item-level networks with Gaussian Graphical Models and compared structural and global strength differences. Exploratory Graph Analysis identified communities of closely related indicators, and centrality and bridge metrics were used to locate highly connected and cross-domain variables.
Results: Across boys and girls, emotional distress indicators, particularly low mood and anxiety, together with adult social support from family and teachers, emerged as the most central nodes in the estimated networks. Student-support items acted as key bridges linking emotional, somatic, and social domains. Although girls reported higher levels of psychosomatic and emotional difficulties and boys reported stronger adult support, Network Comparison Test indicated no significant sex differences in overall network structure or global strength. Sensitivity analyses using Mixed Graphical Models yielded consistent results.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that, within this cross-sectional network model, emotional distress indicators and supportive relationships occupy central positions in the pattern of conditional associations. Although causal inferences cannot be drawn from such models, the central positioning of low mood, anxiety, and supportive relationships highlights them as candidates for further investigation in intervention research.