Adolescents’ School Experiences and Wellbeing: Longitudinal Relationships using a Developmental Cascades Approach

While prior research has established that social school experiences and wellbeing are associated, less is known about their associations over time, whether changes in a single school domain may lead to changes in other school experiences and/or in wellbeing, and if these associations may be reciprocal. Drawing on a developmental cascades framework, this study fitted a Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model to a large sample of N= 27,623 secondary school students (aged 12 at T1) over three annual time points to examine relationships between bullying victimisation, staff-student relationships, school belonging, and wellbeing, separating out between-person differences from within-person change. We found significant bidirectional relationships between bullying and wellbeing and school belonging and wellbeing respectively. Our findings also highlighted wellbeing as a significant predictor of all focal variables, while staff-student relationships did not yield cascade effects on any of the other variables in the model.