Individual and psychosocial factors of mental health indicators among Slovak university students

Background: Frequent surveys evaluating mental health risk factors for students and their resilience to stress during university studies seem to be very important for both monitoring and prevention purposes. The findings have shown that the association between stress and well-being, and stress and depressive feelings is not only direct but also mediated and moderated by other psychosocial variables. However, there still remains a lack of studies that would test comprehensive models exploring different sets of variables; such as gender, social support, self-regulation, perceived stress and resilience as well as analysis showing to what degree they contribute to the variance in health indicators. Furthermore, it might be even more important to address the underlying processes behind these associations and explain how (i.e. mediation) and under which conditions (i.e. moderation) these associations with mental health indicators operate. Objective: The first aim of this study was to explore how much variance in the health indicators, emotional wellbeing (EWB) and depressive symptoms (M-BDI), can be explained by a set of individual and psychosocial factors: gender, social support, self-regulation, perceived stress and resilience. Secondly, this study aimed to explore the indirect effect of perceived stress on mental health indicators through the resilience among university students. The final aim was to test whether this indirect effect is moderated by social support, or, in other words, whether it depends on the level of social support. Method: 237 students from four universities in Eastern Slovakia took part in this study (79.4% females, all aged 18–35, mean age 19.94, SD = 1.54). The collection of the data was part of the SLiCE (Student Life Cohort in Europe) research project. The SLiCE study has developed from previous collaborative research activities within the Cross-National Student Health Survey which was conducted in May 2008. The data came from the second round of this study. The selected universities provided e-mail addresses of all first year students who were asked to participate in the first round of the study. From 4,062 students, 814 provided data by completing an online questionnaire (response rate: 20.03%) and 237 also participated in the second round (response rate: 29.12% from the first round, 5.83% from all asked students). In total, 237 respondents provided data on all studied variables. Two measures were used as the indicators of mental he