It's lonely at the bottom: investigating the role of social integration in the association between social class and mental health

It has been widely established that working-class people tend to have poorer mental health compared to people from upper classes. Additionally, research suggests that the working class are less socially supported and connected. The present research investigated the role of social integration in the relationship between social class and mental health in both university populations and the general population. Starting with a university focus, Study 1 involved a three-wave longitudinal study (N = 152) conducted within the Australian university population, Study 2 was a longitudinal archival study (N = 2,333), and Study 3 included a cross-sectional study (Chapter 5, N = 321) conducted within the Australian university population. Consistent with my predictions, in Studies 1 and 3, I found that social integration mediated the relationship between social class and mental health. Study 2 demonstrated that the relationship between social class and social integration is pervasive and does not vary as a function of the type of institutions that students attend or where they are living. Further, Study 3’s results suggested that working-class students are less socially integrated because they tend to be older and thus have less time available to socialise. I then extended my investigations into the general population with three studies I conducted within the general Australian population. Studies 4 (N = 15,028) and 5 (N = 1,946) included two large nationally representative cross-sectional archival studies. Study 6 involved cross-sectional study (N = 461) with participants recruited from the general Australian population. All studies showed that social integration mediated the relationship between social class and mental health. In addition, Study 6 demonstrated that working-class individuals had less money to socialise and were more uncertain about their place in society, and these differences predicted their lower integration and mental health. Overall, I suggest that social integration has the potential to improve the mental health of working-class individuals.