How do socioeconomic status relate to social relationships among adolescents: a school-based study in East China

BACKGROUND: A great number of studies have concentrated on the influence of socioeconomic status with health outcomes, but little on how socioeconomic status affects social relationship in adolescents’ families, peers and schools. This study aimed to clarify more detailed information on the connection between social relationships and different dimensions of socioeconomic status. METHODS: A school-based cross-sectional study was performed by 13–18 adolescents enrolled in East China from September, 2018 to May, 2019, which recruited 6902 students from junior and senior high schools and used the stratified random sampling method. Parent-child relationship (cohesion, expressiveness, conflict), peer relationship (interpersonal relationship, communication and interaction, social emotion) and student-teacher relationship (intimacy, support, satisfaction, conflict) were investigated. Besides, objective socioeconomic status (parental education and occupation, assessed by the adolescent) and subjective socioeconomic status (self-evaluation of family social class) were measured. More detailed information was used to clarify the link between social relationships and different dimensions of socioeconomic status. RESULTS: All five indicators of socioeconomic status were slightly positively correlated with the quality of social relationships (r ranged from 0.036 to 0.189, all p < 0.001), except that maternal education was not correlated with the conflict dimension of parent-child relationship. Standardized regression coefficients indicated that paternal education (β = 0.08) and occupation (β = 0.07) were the predictors of parent-child relationship. And peer relationship model revealed that the corresponding effect size was slightly stronger for subjective socioeconomic status (β = 0.10), whereas the maternal education had a slightly stronger correlation with student-teacher relationship (β = 0.07) relative to other indicators. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescents with lower socioeconomic status had poorer social relationships compared to those with higher socioeconomic status. These findings have important public health implications for health policy makers to make sound decisions on resources allocation and services planning in improving adolescents’ social relationships and promoting health outcomes.