Life satisfaction and parental support among secondary school students in Urumqi: the mediation of physical activity

Study setting and participants

According to relevant survey results, the prevalence of myopia among primary and secondary school students in Urumqi in 2019 was 36.2%  (Shiet al., 2021). The sample size estimation equation was as follows: $N=\frac{t^2\alpha PQ}{d^2}$ (p is the expected prevalence, d is the permissible error, Q = 1-p), set α = 0.05, t_α = 1.96, permissible error d = 0.1p, preliminary estimated sample size N = 400 (1 − p)/p = 705, taking into account factors such as missed interviews and invalid questionnaires, and finally identified around 2,400 students as the study sample. The study was conducted in a cross-sectional survey in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Western China, from December 2021 to January 2022. Stratified whole-group random sampling was used to select participants. Two districts (Tianshan District and Shuimogou District) were randomly selected from the seven districts and one county under the jurisdiction of Urumqi city (Xinshi Qu, Tianshan District, Saybag District, Shuimogou District, Toutunhe District, Dabancheng District, Midong District and Urumqi County); five schools (one junior middle school, two senior high schools and two middle schools with integrated junior middle and senior high schools) were then randomly selected and stratified by grade level, and in each eligible school, a proportional random, three classes each from junior middle one to senior high three were sampled and the whole class was sampled as a whole group. A total of 2,506 paper copies of the questionnaires were distributed, and after eliminating invalid questionnaires with missing key information, 2,474 were included in the questionnaire analysis, with a valid return rate of 98.72% and an average student age of (14.31  ± 1.76) years. The inclusion criteria were those who lived in the local area for 12 months, all subjects gave their informed consent and participated voluntarily in the survey. In this study, exclusion criteria were any of the following self-reports: absence from school in the last week for any reason; refusal to cooperate with the questionnaire. The study was approved by the Ethics Review Committee of Urumqi Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist Hospital (Ethics number: 20211201) and the questionnaire was administered by the students and their legal guardians and signed informed consent forms.

Measurements

Scale assessment

Basic information

Table 1 shows the characteristics of all included participants, among the 2,474 secondary school students surveyed in Urumqi, boys (45.8%) and girls (54.2%). Junior middle 1 students (29.2%), junior middle 2 students (26.2%), junior middle 3 students (8.6%), senior high 1 students (12.0%), senior high 2 students (16.9%) and senior high 3 students (7.2%). It was noted that 1.6% of mothers and 2.1% of fathers had completed postgraduate studies or above. A total of 2.8% of participants recalled a total household income greater than RMB 400,000 per year. A total of 1,522 participants (61.5%) reported sleeping 6–8 h per day.

Life satisfaction, physical activity, and parental support

The total mean score of life satisfaction among secondary school students in Urumqi was (193.77 ± 33.28), physical activity score (2.11 ± 0.64), maternal support score (24.85 ± 4.31), and paternal support score (24.73 ± 4.40). The differences in life satisfaction were statistically significant (P < 0.05) across the school year, gender, sleep duration, parental education, and total income. The differences in physical activity were statistically significant across the school year, gender, sleep duration, and total income (P < 0.05). The differences in maternal support were statistically significant across school years, gender, hours of sleep, and parental education (P < 0.05). The differences in paternal support were statistically significant in terms of different school years, sleep duration and parental education (P < 0.01) (Table 1).

Correlation analysis of physical activity, parental support and life satisfaction

Pearson’s correlation analysis showed that life satisfaction scores were positively correlated with physical activity scores (r = 0.223, P < 0.01), physical activity scores were positively correlated with maternal support and paternal support (r = 0.201, 0.230, P < 0.01), and life satisfaction scores were positively correlated with maternal support and paternal support were also positively correlated (r = 0.246, 0.277, P < 0.01) (Table 2).

The relationship between parental support, physical activity and life satisfaction

Mediating effects of parental support in the relationship between physical activity and life satisfaction

Mediating effect of maternal support between physical activity and life satisfaction

With maternal support as the independent variable and life satisfaction as the dependent variable, the results of the structural equation model using Amos showed that the direct effect of Bootstrap 95% CI of physical activity as a mediating variable between life satisfaction and maternal support was (0.025 to 0.050), excluding 0, indicating that physical activity has a mediating role, the mediating effect(a*b) = total effect(c)-direct effect(c’) =0.036, and the mediating effect model is shown in Fig. 1, where physical activity as a mediating effect accounts for 11.88% of the total effect and the direct effect is 88.12% of the total effect (Table 5).

Table 5:

Bootstrap analysis of the mediating effect of physical activity between maternal support and life satisfaction.

Effect type	Path	Effect value	Boot SE	Boot 95%CI	Amount of effect (%)
Mediation effect	SS_Mo →PA →Life satisfaction	0.036	0.006	0.025∼0.050	11.88
Direct effect	SS_Mo →Life satisfaction	0.267	0.026	0.217∼0.317	88.12
Total effect		0.303	0.026	0.253∼0.353

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.14122/table-5

Notes:

PA

Physical Activity Score

SS_Mo

Parental Support of Mother

Relationship between physical activity, parental support and life satisfaction

This study found that physical activity was positively associated with parental support, consistent with the study by Tu, Watts & Masse (2015). Parental support for physical activity in secondary school students conveys a positive attitude towards health, life and physical activity, can motivate students to develop a positive physical activity state and achieve better self-development (Xu & Dong, 2021), which is in line with the findings of Shi & Wang (2021), which may be due to the fact that secondary school students in adolescence are prone to anxiety due to academic pressure, etc., and when they receive parental support, it is beneficial to adopt a positive coping style and thus increase life satisfaction. This may be due to the fact that adolescent students are prone to anxiety due to academic stress, and when they have parental support, it is beneficial for them to adopt positive coping styles and thus increase their life satisfaction. The results of this study showed that physical activity was positively associated with life satisfaction among secondary school students. Xu et al. (2018) found that moderate-to-high intensity physical activity had a positive effect on life satisfaction (Greenwood, 2019). Secondary school students should be encouraged to engage in more physical activities to improve their life satisfaction. Among them, girls scored lower in life satisfaction than boys in terms of physical activity level.

Physical activity has a mediating effect between life satisfaction and parental support

The results in this study showed a mediating effect of physical activity between life satisfaction and parental support, indicating that parental support holding can affect secondary school students’ life satisfaction not only directly but also indirectly through physical activity, suggesting a role for physical activity between parental support and life satisfaction. However, the mediating effect values were relatively small, in which the mediating effect values between physical activity and life satisfaction and maternal support and paternal support were 11.88% and 11.38% respectively, and the differences were not statistically significant, which may be related to the small sample size and the small scope of the study area in this study, and the sample size and study area can be further expanded in the follow-up study. Among them, the effect of a supportive environment for fathers on secondary school students’ physical activity was slightly greater than that of mother’s supportive environment, which is consistent with the study by Liu et al. (2022). Related research suggests that fathers play a key role in promoting their children’s physical activity and influencing their choices and behaviors  (Zahra, Sebire & Jago, 2015) and that having fathers participate in physical activities with their children can promote increased physical activity in children  (Morgan et al., 2014). The results of this study show that parental support environments have different effects on secondary school students’ life satisfaction, with fathers’ support having a greater impact on secondary school students’ life satisfaction. Some studies have shown that parenting style is a key factor influencing the level of physical activity participation of adolescents (Wang, 2019), while parenting style largely influences the healthy growth of an individual’s personality and level of psychological well-being (Wang, Yang & Shan, 2022), both parents have different parenting styles, with fathers being higher than mothers on the rejection dimension and the opposite on the emotional warmth and overprotection dimension (Zhang, Li & Ku, 2022), which may be due to the “strict father and loving mother” dimension in China. This may be due to the gender roles of “strict father and loving mother” in China. Liu’s study found that fathers have a significant impact on children’s self-efficacy (Liu, 2020), suggesting that paternal support can alleviate fathers’ anxiety from mother to child (Liu, Guo & Chen, 2022), resulting in higher life satisfaction among secondary school students when fathers are supportive.

In summary, both parents, especially fathers, should encourage appropriate physical activity in secondary school students, increase support for physical activity in secondary school students, and enhance secondary school students’ perceptions of their life state. Secondary school students should take an active role in physical activity or outdoor sports, develop a wide range of hobbies and interests, and maintain a positive attitude towards life to further enhance life satisfaction.

Although this study has some important findings, some limitations should be acknowledged. First, as this study adopts a local area cross-sectional survey, it can only show that there is an association between parental support, physical activity and life satisfaction, and cannot make inferences about the causal relationship between life satisfaction and physical activity and parental support, which can be further explored using cohort studies. Second, there may be information bias (or recall bias) in the secondary school students’ recall of parental educational level during the process of completing the questionnaire. In addition, the study sample was limited to one area of Urumqi city, and there may be measurement and sampling errors in the survey process, and the objectivity of the results needs to be further verified. Finally, the lack of information on Socio-Economic Status (SES) in this paper may cause some errors in the results of this study, which should be further explored in later studies. The findings in this study have the following practical implications: on the one hand, schools, parents and society should recognize the importance of parental support and physical activity levels in improving the life satisfaction of secondary school students and suggest that parents, especially fathers, should encourage their children to be physically active appropriately and increase their support for physical activity. On the other hand, the importance of physical activity in promoting the mental health of secondary school students is emphasized. Secondary school students should engage in appropriate physical activities in their own lives in order to develop positive emotions, which also contribute to their life satisfaction.