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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Developmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1444524
Reciprocal impact of mental health and quality of life in children and adolescentsa cross-lagged panel analysis
Provisionally accepted
Markus Antonius Wirtz 1*
Janine Devine 2
Erhart Michael 3
Franziska Reiß 2 Maren Böcker 4
Anja Alexandra Schulz 1 Fionna Zöllner 2
Ann-Kathrin Napp 2
Ulrike Ravens-Sieberer 2 Anne Kaman 2- 1 University of Education Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
- 2 Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
- 3 Alice Salomon University, Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- 4 University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany
A thorough understanding of the interplay of mental health and quality of life is essential to describe, understand and support the healthy development of children and adolescents. The study aims to determine the reciprocal predictive value between psychosomatic symptoms, mental health problems and quality of life of children (N = 313) and adolescents (N = 421) during the COVID-19 pandemic using a cross lagged panel analysis. Data from the population-based longitudinal COPSY study on the mental health and quality of life of children and adolescents were analyzed. By using cross-lagged panel analyses (joint analysis of longitudinal and cross-sectional data), hypotheses on the time-shifted reciprocal prediction of the characteristics could be tested. For children in particular, mental health characteristics proved to be time-shifted predictors of quality of life -not or at least significantly weaker vice versa. The methodological approach ensures a significantly higher validity than usual findings based on purely cross-sectional or longitudinal data and improves the empirical basis for the presumed impact of psychological characteristics on quality of lifean vice versa. As a result, developmental processes of children and adolescents can be traced more validly.
Keywords: Quality of Life, Mental Health, Children's health, Adolescent's health, COVID-19 pandemic
Received: 06 Jun 2024; Accepted: 06 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wirtz, Devine, Michael, Reiß, Böcker, Schulz, Zöllner, Napp, Ravens-Sieberer and Kaman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Markus Antonius Wirtz, University of Education Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
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