Relationships Among Aggression, Life Skills, Social Support, and Mental Health in Japanese College Students

Abstract

Recently, aggression has been paid attention as a risk factor of mental health in college students in Japan, and then to cope and prevent an expression of aggression have been an important issue. To reduce aggression, improving life skills and increasing perceived social supports are considered to be effective. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationships among aggression, life skills, social support, and mental health. Subjects were 545 college students (222 males, 323 females, mean age: 19.8±1.2 years). Japanese Version of the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (Ando et al., 1999), Daily Life Skills Scale for College Students (Shimamoto et al., 2006), Japanese Version of Social Support Scale (Iwasa et al., 2007), and Japanese Version of the 12-Item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ12; Nakasugi, 1987) were measured by questionnaire method. Covariance structure analysis showed that the life skills scores were positively related to the social support scores directly, and then, social support scores were negatively related to the GHQ12 scores directly, and negatively related to the GHQ12 scores via the aggression scores (GFI=.998, AGFI=.992, RMSEA=.000). These results suggest that improving life skills contributes to promote mental health and to reduce aggression via increasing perceived social support from “Familyâ€, “Friendsâ€, and “Significant otherâ€.