Comprehensive mental health assessment for soldiers and gender differences based on network analysis

To explore the network structural characteristics, core factors, and gender differences in the comprehensive assessment of mental health in military personnel.

A total of 4105 officers and soldiers were subjected and surveyed using the Comprehensive Mental Health Assessment Questionnaire for Soldiers. Through network analysis, a network model for comprehensive mental health assessment of military personnel was constructed with the R qgraph Package. The core factors of their mental health were explored using the qgraph package, and the reliability of the network structure was evaluated using the bootnet package. Then a comparative analysis was conducted on the network characteristics of comprehensive mental health assessments between male and female participants using permutation tests with the NetworkComparisonTest package in R.

In the network of the comprehensive assessment of military personnel mental health, the strongest association was observed between institutional trust and interpersonal trust, followed by interpersonal trust and sense of meaning in life, adaptability and positive coping, as well as depression and negative emotions, with a regularized partial correlation coefficient of 0.49, 0.45, 0.44, and 0.42, respectively. The core factors were interpersonal trust, work engagement, and institutional trust, with an expected influence of 1.095, 1.060, and 1.039, respectively. The 95% confidence intervals (CIs) obtained from the edge weight accuracy assessment were relatively narrow, and the correlation stability coefficient of the network was 0.75, indicating a stable and reliable network structure. Furthermore, there were significant differences in the network structure of comprehensive mental health assessments between male and female participants (M=0.335, P<0.001), especially in the core factor, interpersonal trust, with particularly significant gender difference (P<0.01).

Interpersonal trust, work engagement, and institutional trust are the core factors in the comprehensive assessment of military personnel’s mental health. There are gender differences in the network structure of the comprehensive assessment of mental health for military personnel.