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. 2024 May 23;10(11):e31783.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e31783. eCollection 2024 Jun 15.

How social support and resilience impact mental health: The moderating role of time in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Fang Xie  1 , Xiaona Wu  2 , Chaoli Deng  3 , Xiaoqian Li  2 , Ziyu Yi  2
Affiliations

How social support and resilience impact mental health: The moderating role of time in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Fang Xie et al. Heliyon. .

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines effectively prevented the spread of COVID-19 but also caused people to develop mental health problems. We thus aimed to verify the impact of social support and resilience on mental health and to uncover the moderating role played by time in isolation during the post-pandemic era. We administered a cross-sectional survey to 510 college students. The results found that social support directly and negatively predicted mental health problems, and this relationship was mediated by resilience. Through multigroup analysis, resilience partially mediated the relationship between social support and mental health during period of isolation 1 (PI1) and fully mediated this relationship during period of isolation 2 (PI2) and period of isolation 3 (PI3). Moreover, the path coefficient of resilience to mental health at T3 was significantly higher than that at T2. Thus, the effect of resilience on mental health increases with the duration of time in isolation.

Keywords: Mental health; Multi-group analysis; Resilience; Social support; Time in isolation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The study model.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Full model; ***p < 0.001, *p < 0.05.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The SEM model for time in isolation 1; ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The SEM model for time in isolation 2; ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
The SEM model for time in isolation 3; ***p < 0.001.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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