I Can Count on You: Patterns of Perceived Social Support and Their Associations with Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidality among Adolescents

This study aimed to examine the patterns of perceived social support (PSS) and their association with sociodemographics and mental health concerns among Korean adolescents. A total of 663 adolescents in junior high/middle school and high school were included in this study. A person-centered approach, latent profile analysis, was utilized to explore the heterogeneous patterns of PSS. The R3STEP and DU3STEP commands in Mplus 8.4 were employed to investigate whether predictors (e.g., sociodemographics such as gender, age, and socioeconomic status) could predict class membership, and whether distal outcomes (e.g., mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression, and suicidality) significantly differed among the latent classes. The results indicated that a 3-class solution was optimal for our sample. The three identified classes were as follows: Low PSS group (31.98%), Moderate PSS group (35.90%), and High PSS group (32.13%). Adolescents in each class had converging levels of PSS across all three sources of support (i.e., family, friends, and significant others). This suggests that the Korean adolescents tend to perceive similar levels of support from various important individuals in their lives, whether that support is high, moderate, or low. Gender and socioeconomic status emerged as significant predictors of class membership. Furthermore, the three latent classes demonstrated significantly different scores on mental health concerns: the High PSS group had the lowest scores for anxiety, depression, and suicidality. These findings underscore the interconnected nature of adolescents’ social support networks, highlighting the need for holistic and multi-systemic interventions that recognize the interplay between various sources of support.