Academic Stress and Subjective Well-Being among Chinese and American Adolescents: A Cross-Cultural Analysis Using LLM-Generated Synthetic Data

Abstract

The well-being of adolescents is tightly connected with the long-term mental health and is vulnerable to the academic demands. This paper will study the correlation between academic stress and subjective well-being among Chinese and US adolescents in terms of cross-cultural comparative design. A culturally sensitive bilingual (Mandarin English) synthetic survey responses were produced using large language models, and then screened by hand using plausibility criteria to help methodologically validate the selection of this methodology before the collection of large amounts of empirical data. The findings show that subjective well-being is very much negatively correlated with academic stress in the two countries. The Chinese adolescents have higher levels of academic stress and lower levels of well-being with an average and stress-well-being relationship is also stronger in China. Mediation analysis also indicates that perceived academic autonomy was a mediator of the negative impact of academic stress on well-being, with the indirect impact being bigger in Chinese sample. Such results indicate culture-specific processes of academic stress and attractive use of the synthetic data produced by LLC to cross-cultural research design.