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Abstract Adolescents spend most of their formative years in school, making it an important context to consider when investigating crises. A personal crisis that often has its onset during adolescence is depression. To gain a better understanding of depression in school, we explore possible individual and school-related risk factors and outcomes of depressive symptoms in line with current etiology models. First, we investigate the intersection of possible demographic risk factors of depression (female gender, immigration background, SES). Second, we explore school-related factors (conscientiousness, parental expectations, social inclusion) that might be associated with students’ depressive symptoms, and whether depressive symptoms mediate the effects of these school-related factors on school-functioning (grades, test anxiety). The representative data was collected in 30 Austrian secondary schools in a survey study with three waves. The sample consisted of 1874 12th-grade students from 93 classes. We used well-established self-report scales for all constructs that showed good reliability and students’ mean grades on the most recent tests. Analyses were pre-registered. In general, students experienced heightened depressive symptoms. More specifically, calculating a dummy-coded regression, we found female students with an immigration background and low SES to be the most burdened. The results of the mediation model showed depressive symptoms to partially mediate the association of conscientiousness, social inclusion, and parental expectations with test anxiety; this was not observed for grades. Furthermore, we only found conscientiousness to be positively associated with grades. Directions for future research and implications are discussed.
Fassl et al. (Tue,) studied this question.