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. 2025 Mar 13:11:20552076251326673.
doi: 10.1177/20552076251326673. eCollection 2025 Jan-Dec.

Mitigate or exacerbate? Assessing digital engagement's impact on mental health inequalities across gender and urban-rural divides

Yangyang Wang  1 , Chen Li  2
Affiliations

Mitigate or exacerbate? Assessing digital engagement's impact on mental health inequalities across gender and urban-rural divides

Yangyang Wang et al. Digit Health. .

Abstract

Objectives: Mental health inequalities have increasingly become an important factor affecting social well-being. Existing researches have focused on the impact of digital inequalities on mental health, but there is lack of research exploring the impact of digital engagement on mental health inequalities.

Methods: Based on data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) wave 2020, this study analyzed the effects of digital engagement on adult mental health and mental health inequalities using multinomial OLS models and RIF models. Further, the mitigating effects of digital engagement on gender mental health inequalities and urban-rural mental health inequalities were calculated using RIF decomposition.

Results: Digital engagement positively predicts the mental health level of Chinese adults, and at the same time mitigates mental health inequalities among Chinese adults, including inequalities between genders and between urban and rural areas, and the mitigating effect on mental health inequalities is stronger between urban and rural areas. In addition, the mitigating effect of digital engagement on gender mental health inequalities diminished with increasing mental health levels; however, the mitigating effect of digital engagement on urban-rural mental health inequalities was stronger at low and high mental health levels.

Conclusions: Both gender mental health inequality and urban-rural mental health inequality are evident among Chinese adults. Digital engagement can alleviate overall mental health inequalities, including gender mental health inequalities and urban-rural mental health inequalities, while enhancing mental health. This provides new insights into how best to mitigate mental health inequalities in the digital era.

Keywords: Digital engagement; gender disparities; mental health inequalities; resource substitution theory; urban–rural disparities.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Effect of digital engagement on mental health at different quartiles by gender. Note: Confidence interval information for the regression coefficients is not shown due to limitations in visualization; the regression coefficients in this figure are all statistically significant at the 0.05 level of significance (p < 0.05), except at the 60th quantile, 65th quantile, 70th quantile, 75th quantile, 85th quantile, 90th quantile, for the male sample only.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Effect of digital engagement on mental health at different quartiles by urban–rural. Note: Confidence interval information for the regression coefficients is not shown due to limitations in visualization; the regression coefficients in this figure are all statistically significant at the 0.05 level of significance (p < 0.05), except at the 20th quantile, 70th quantile, 75th quantile, 80th quantile, 90th quantile, for the urban sample only.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Contribution of digital engagement to mental health inequalities at different quartiles by gender and urban–rural.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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