A Systems Dynamics Model of Mental Health During the Transition to Early Adulthood

Monday, July 20, 2026, 11:00 AM

Session: SOC Poster Session (Overflow 2) (In-person)

Mental health during the transition to early adulthood involves dynamic interactions among stress, perceived control, and general health that conventional statistical approaches cannot fully capture. Drawing on ten years of longitudinal pre-post survey data from first-year university students, this study develops a System Dynamics model to explain how feedback-driven processes generate distinct wellbeing trajectories across emotional, social, and psychological domains. Directional structure is informed by longitudinal structural equation modeling establishing that stress-related processes most strongly govern emotional wellbeing while agency- and capacity-based processes more strongly shape social and functional wellbeing. The SD model is organized around three interacting subsystems — stress-distress, control-engagement, and health-capacity — calibrated against observed cohort-level data and validated on held-out cohort years. Intervention simulations will examine whether targeting different system mechanisms produces differential effects across wellbeing domains, providing insight into why mental health interventions often succeed in some areas while producing limited effects in others.