Graduate Students Trapped Between Pressures and Screens: A Multi-Wave Longitudinal Network and Cross-Lagged Panel Study.

Abstract

Chinese graduate students face multiple pressures from academic, familial, social, and personal sources, like academic learning inefficiency (difficulty completing research tasks), campus unfamiliarity (poor environmental adaptation), and certification pressure (obligation to obtain professional credentials). That may drive many to overuse short-form videos as a coping strategy. However, how these pressures dynamically relate to video overuse over time remains unclear. We conducted a three-wave longitudinal study (N = 2471) using Network analysis, Cross-Lagged Panel Network Analysis (CLPN), and Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Model (RI-CLPM). Results revealed three findings. First, across all three waves, strong associations existed between learning inefficiency and campus unfamiliarity, as well as between the ideal-reality gap (discrepancy between expected and actual graduate life) and social adjustment. Central nodes were mainly certification pressure and parental expectations. Second, CLPN indicated that short-form video overuse showed the strongest autoregressive edge; the strongest cross-lagged edge was from social pressure to personal stress. School pressure appears to have had a stronger impact on other variables at the subsequent time point, while both school pressure and family pressure appear to have exerted a greater contemporaneous influence on other variables. School pressure and family pressure may have subsequently increased short-form video overuse. Last, RI-CLPM indicated that higher overall pressure levels significantly predicted increased video overuse at the next wave, but the reverse effect was non-significant. Implications include prioritising certification pressure and parental expectations, proactive school pressure management, and addressing video overuse by targeting its pressure drivers rather than the behaviour itself.