Academic Achievement And Depression Of Left-behind And Non Left-behind Children: The Moderating Role Of Friendship

Left-behind children are more likely to suffer with all kinds of emotional and behavioral problems due to the long separation with parents. Among these problems, depression is the common emotional experience of left-behind children. Therefore, how to alleviate the problem of depression in left-behind children becomes an urgent problem to be solved. Research shows that the academic performance of left-behind children is generally poor, which is a significant negative life event in the left-behind children. At the same time, friends play an important role in children's growth. For most left-behind children, the support of friends will help to chase away some of the gloom and relieve negative pressure. This is very important when they are facing negative life events during parents' long time farther away from home for work. In view of this, the main purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between academic achievement and friendship, as well as the role of friendship quality in reducing depression, aiming at rural left-behind children. At the same time, the moderating effect of friendship quality on academic performance was investigated for depression of both left-behind children and non-left behind children.A total of 571 left-behind and non-left-behind children as subjects, the academic achievement, friendship quality and depression scale were tested with self-report measures. The results showed that:1. Left-behind children's depression was significantly higher than that of left-behind children; the girl and the boy's depression scale does not exist significant differences.2. Left-behind children and non-left-behind children's academic achievement had no significant difference; Girls in academic achievement scored significantly higher than boys.3. There were significant differences between left-behind children and non-left-behind children's friendship quality, when specific to each dimension of friendship quality. Left-behind children earned lower scores on help accompany subscale of friendship quality questionnaire. On the other side, their scores were significantly higher than that of non-left-behind children in the dimension of conflict. The girl scored significantly higher than boys in the intimacy dimension. The interaction effect between gender and left-behind on friendship quality was not significant.4. For both of left-behind children and non-left-behind children, academic performance had significant negative prediction on the depression of left-behind children as well as non-left-behind children in rural areas.5. Among the group of left-behind children, friends' instrumental help had significant negative prediction on depression, while conflict, conflict intensity can positively predict the depression; For the non-left-behind children, intimacy can significantly negatively predict their depression while conflict and conflict intensity can significantly positively predict their depression.6. There are differences on the moderating effect of friendship quality between left-behind children and non-left-behind children. It shows that friendship quality had no moderating effect in the group of left-behind children, and the friendship quality among non-left-behind children plays a moderating role between academic achievement and depression when comes to the dimension of friends' instrumental help.7. There is no significant difference on the moderating effect of friendship quality between boys and girls.