Associations of compositional time use with self-reported health, depression, and cognitive outcomes among Chinese adolescents

Adolescents are experiencing substantial changes across many developmental dimensions. Their daily time allocation might be closely related to these changes. Using two waves of nationally representative data (Mage = 12.90, n = 8,030), this study examined the evolving time-use patterns of Chinese junior high school students (CJHSS) transitioning from grades 7 to 8 and their impacts on self-reported health, depressive symptoms, and cognitive abilities. The latent class analysis identified four stable time-use clusters among CJHSS: obedient actives (OA, highest study time), moderate actives (MoA, high study time), independent actives (IA, lowest study time and highest other time), and multifaceted actives (MuA, highest sleep time). Individual fixed-effect models revealed that transitioning to study-centered actives (OA and MoA) decreased self-reported health and increased depression, while the counterpart actives (IA and MuA) were beneficial. Specifically, study time was negatively associated with self-reported health and cognitive outcomes and positively related to depression, whereas sleep and other time led to lower depressive symptoms. Notably, the associations between time use and developmental outcomes (depression and cognition) were heterogeneous across students’ gender, family economic status, and parental education. Our findings provide novel insights regarding interventions for optimizing adolescents’ time allocation and improving their well-being under the “Double Reduction” education policy.