Classmates' Discrimination Experiences and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms: Evidence From Random Assignment of Students to Classrooms in South Korea

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the association between classmates' discrimi-nation experiences and an individual student's depressive symptoms. A set of social-psychological and behavioral variables were considered as potential mechanisms underlying this association.Methods: The data came from the Gyeonggi Education Panel Study of seventh graders in South Korea. This study leveraged quasi-experimental variation generated from random assignment of students to classes within schools to address the endogenous school selection problem and ac-count for the unobserved school-level confounders. To formally test for mediation, Sobel tests were conducted and peer attachment, school satisfaction, smoking, and drinking were explored as mechanism variables.Results: An increase in classmates' discrimination experiences was positively associated with an individual student's depressive symptoms. This association remained statistically significant even after adjusting for personal discrimination experience, a myriad of individual-and class-level covariates, as well as school fixed effects (b = 0.325, p < .05). Classmates' discrimination experi-ences were also associated with a decline in peer attachment and school satisfaction (b = -0.386, p < .01 and b = -0.399, p < .05, respectively). These psychosocial factors explained about one-third of the association between classmates' discrimination experiences and individual students' depressive symptoms.Discussion: The findings of this study suggest that exposure to peer-level discrimination experi-ence leads to friend detachment and school dissatisfaction, which in turn increases an individual student's depressive symptoms. This study reaffirms the importance of fostering a more cohesive and nondiscriminatory school environment to promote adolescents' psychological health and well-being.(c) 2023 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. All rights reserved.