Objective To systematically analyze the factors influencing the left-behind children’s mental health. Methods After the search term and strategy were confirmed by researchers, four Chinese databases including Chinese Biological Medical Literature Database (CBM), Chinese Science and Technology Periodical Database (VIP), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and WanFang Database (WF) were searched to collect papers, published before March 2011, on relevant factors influencing mental health of left-behind children in China. Then two reviewers independently screened, extracted and cross-checked the data, and the disagreements were resolved by discussion or by consulting a third reviewer. Qualitative synthesis method was used to analyze the study results. Results Of the total 3 252 records, 49 studies were included. The results of qualitative analysis showed that factors influencing left-behind children’s mental health could be classified into four categories including social factors, family factors, school factors and personal factors. Of the nearly 30 kinds of specific factors, the main ones were gender, age, parent-child relationship, social support, personality and characteristics, and outgoing condition of parents, etc. Conclusion Current research results indicate that many factors have influences on mental health of left-behind children, but the research quality is not high with low argument efficiency. There are still controversies on several factors’ impact. Longitudinal studies with rigorous design are needed to analyze the impact of different factors on the left-behind children’s mental health and to summarize the interaction between various factors, so as to provide scientific evidence for developing practical and effective intervention measures.
Objective To systematically review the literatures on left-behind children’s mental health status, and to describe and analyze the current domestic left-behind children’s main psychological health problems. Methods With the search terms and strategies predefined by repeated discuss and pre-retrieval, the literatures in Chinese published before March 2011 were searched in following four Chinese databases including Chinese Biological Medical Literature Database (CBM), Chinese Science and Technology Periodical Database (VIP), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and WanFang Dissertation Database (WF). All research papers that reported the left-behind children’s mental health status and problems within China were included. Two reviewers independently screened the literatures and extracted the data. Disagreements were resolved by discussion or by involving a third researcher. The qualitative synthesis method was used to analyze the studies, while the meta-analysis was not adopted because of the tremendous heterogeneity of each study on the definition of left-behind children, study design and outcomes. Results A total of 155 studies were included for the final analysis and all of them were the cross-sectional study including 63 uncontrolled cross-sectional studies and 92 controlled cross-sectional studies. Most of the results showed that compared with the non-left-behind children, the left-behind children’s mental health level was lower and there were many psychological problems. While several studies suggested that there was no significant difference between the two groups. The left-behind children in different types (such as different gender, age, guardianship types, the migrant condition of parents, etc.) had different mental health problems. Conclusion The results of the current research indicate that the left-behind children have many mental health problems. However, the results are still controversial. The definitions of left-behind children have not been unified and the quality of current studies is generally low, which might influence the synthesis of results. High quality of controlled studies and long-term prospective cohort studies need to be conducted to study more accurately and deeply on the left-behind children’s mental health and on the differences between the left-behind children and non-left-behind children.