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Associations Between Family Function and Non-suicidal Self-injury Among Chinese Urban Adolescents with and Without Parental Migration

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Abstract

The study aims to explore the effect of family function on non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) among Chinese urban adolescents with and without parental migration. Between April 21st to May 12th, 2021, adolescents were recruited from Shenzhen city of Guangdong province, China (n = 124,357). Of all the participants, 22,855 (18.4%) were left-behind children (LBC). Family function, NSSI, depression, and socio-demographic characteristics were assessed using a series of self-reported questionnaires. Urban LBC had a higher NSSI frequency, while a lower level of family function than non-LBC. After controlling for confounders, parental migration was significantly associated with NSSI, and family dysfunction was a robust risk factor for NSSI as well. The protective effect of family function on NSSI of LBC was stronger than non-LBC. This implies that children with higher levels of family function tend to exhibit a lower frequency of NSSI, especially in those with parental migration. In practice, adolescents’ NSSI prevention and intervention strategies should focus on improving family function.

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Data Availability

The data presented in this study is available upon request from the corresponding author.

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Funding

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 32271135, 31871129).

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Author notes

  1. Dongfang Wang and Zijuan Ma contributed equally to this work as co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Centre for Studies of Psychological Applications, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Educational Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

    Dongfang Wang, Zijuan Ma, Yunge Fan, Wenxu Liu, Yifan Zhang & Fang Fan

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Huilin Chen

  3. Shenzhen Bao’an Institute of Education Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    Huijun Zeng

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  1. Dongfang Wang
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  5. Wenxu Liu
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Contributions

DW and FF contributed to the design of the research; DW, ZM, YF and HC contributed to the writing of the manuscript. WL and YZ collected and analyzed the data; HZ and FF supervised the project and gave valuable comments about the interpretation of the data; All authors reviewed the manuscript for important content.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fang Fan.

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Ethical Approval

The investigation was carried out in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 1989 and approved by the Ethics Committees of South China Normal University (SCNU-PSY-2021-094). Consent to Participate Informed consent was obtained from legal guardians and informed assent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Wang, D., Ma, Z., Fan, Y. et al. Associations Between Family Function and Non-suicidal Self-injury Among Chinese Urban Adolescents with and Without Parental Migration. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-023-01528-7

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