Out-of-School Activities on Weekdays and Adolescent Adjustment in China: a Person-Centered Approach

The present study used a person-centered approach to identify adolescent out-of-school activity profiles and to examine whether academic achievement, cognitive ability and negative emotion vary across different profiles. Data were collected from 9312 adolescents, and four profiles were identified: the “academic tutoring profile”, the “moderate time-consuming profile”, the “screen profile” and the “low time-consuming profile”. These four profiles differed in academic achievement, cognitive ability and negative emotion. The students in the low time-consuming profile had the best performance on all indicators. Those in the academic tutoring profile had high academic achievement but a low level of cognitive ability and a high level of negative emotion. This result indicates that for some students, long-term academic tutoring can improve their academic achievement through emotional costs and that academic tutoring cannot improve their cognitive ability. The students in the screen profile had the worst performance on both academic achievement and cognitive ability, and the large amount of screen time did not even make them happy.