Life meaning and purpose as an unrecognized determinant of mental health equity in Canadian adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The etiological pathways through which structural determinants result in health inequities remain unclear. In adolescent populations, a sense of meaning and purpose in life has been hypothesized and considered cross-sectionally to represent an intermediary determinant in the pathway that connects wealth with mental health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to prospectively explore how life meaning and purpose contributes to disparities in mental health observed by affluence in an adolescent cohort. METHODS: We used two-year linked survey data collected from a cohort of 17,745 students at Canadian secondary schools in 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. Structural equation models were used to examine the prospective associations between students' perceived relative family affluence and anxiety and depression symptoms, mediated by their sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Models were stratified by gender identity. RESULTS: The prevalence of clinically-relevant depression and anxiety symptoms was lowest among cisgender boys and highest among transgender and gender diverse adolescents. Conversely, life meaning and purpose was reported most often by cisgender boys, followed by cisgender girls. Meaning and purpose in life partially mediated associations between relative affluence and depression and anxiety symptoms. CONCLUSION: Consistent with determinants of health models and past cross-national analyses of adolescent health survey data in Canada, results provide prospective evidence in support of life meaning and purpose as an intermediary determinant of mental health in adolescents. Experiences that foster a sense of meaning and purpose in life require recognition as determinants of health, and suggest an intangible resource that can be applied to clinical and public health initiatives that address adolescent mental health.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".