Parenting Styles, Peer Relationships, and Social Media Use as Predictors of University Students' Mental Health in Makassar City

Аннотация

This study examines the associations of parenting styles, peer relationships, and social media use with the mental health of university students in Makassar City, Indonesia. A quantitative approach was applied using a non-probability (saturated) sample of 30 active undergraduate students aged 18 to 22 from various public and private universities. As the sample was small and non-probabilistic, the findings are exploratory and cannot be generalized to all university students in Makassar City. Data were collected through a Likert-scale questionnaire measuring four variables, namely Parenting Style, Peer Relationships, Social Media Use, and Mental Health, and were analyzed using validity and reliability testing, classical assumption testing, Pearson correlation, and multiple linear regression in SPSS. Pearson correlation analysis indicated that peer relationships had a strong and significant relationship with mental health (r = 0.672, p < 0.001), social media use had a moderate and significant relationship (r = 0.544, p = 0.002), while parenting style showed only a weak and non-significant bivariate relationship (r = 0.349, p = 0.059). However, multiple regression analysis revealed that, taken together, the three variables significantly predicted mental health (R = 0.803; R square = 0.644; F = 15.680; p < 0.001), accounting for 64.4 percent of the variance, with each predictor contributing significantly in the combined model (parenting style, peer relationships, and social media use all p < 0.05). Peer relationships emerged as the strongest individual contributor (39.7 percent), followed by social media use (15.0 percent) and parenting style (9.5 percent). These findings suggest that although parenting style alone shows a limited direct association with mental health, it was a statistically significant but imprecisely estimated predictor when considered jointly with peer relationships and social media use, and that student mental health is associated with an interconnected set of family, peer, and digital factors rather than any single factor in isolation.