Table 1.

Five mental health outcomes considered in this study.

Mental health outcome	Psychological scale used	Example questions	Mental health metric	Answer scale
Self‐esteem	Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale (Rosenberg 1965)	“On the whole, I am satisfied with myself.” “I feel I do not have much to be proud of.”	positive	Respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they agree with the 10 items on a four‐point scale, ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree) for positive items, and the scores reversed when the items are negative. The scores across the 10 items were summed, ranging from 0 to 40, with higher values indicating greater self‐esteem.
Life satisfaction	Liang’s (1984) version of the Life Satisfaction Index A (Neugarten et al. 1961)	“This is the dreariest time of my life.” “I would not change my past life even if I could do.”	positive	Respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they agree with the 11 items on a three‐point scale, ranging from 0 (disagree) to 2 (agree) for positive items, and the scores reversed when the items are negative. The scores across the 11 items were summed, ranging from 0 to 22, with higher values indicating greater life satisfaction.
Subjective happiness	Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper 1999)	“In general, I consider myself: …” “Some people are generally very happy. They enjoy life regardless of what is going on, getting the most out of everything. To what extent does this characterization describe you?”	positive	Respondents were asked to answer the four items on a seven‐point scale, ranging from 1 (very unhappy or not at all) to 7 (very happy to a great deal). The scores across the four items were summed, ranging from 4 to 28, with higher values indicating greater happiness.
Loneliness	UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3) (Russell 1996)	“How often do you feel alone?” “How often do you feel close to people?”	negative	Respondents were asked to answer the 20 items on a four‐point scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 4 (often) for negative items, and the scores reversed when the items are positive. The scores across the 20 items were summed, ranging from 20 to 80, with higher values indicating greater loneliness.
Depression and anxiety	12‐item General Health Questionnaire (Goldberg and Williams 1988)†	“Have you recently been able to concentrate on what you’re doing?” “Have you recently lost much sleep over worry?”	negative	Respondents were asked to answer the 12 items. For each question, responses indicating distress score 1 and those indicating no or limited distress score 0. The scores across the 12 items were summed, ranging from 0 to 12, with higher values indicating greater symptoms of depression.

We used the resultant variables as the response variables in our analysis.

^†This is the most extensively used self‐reporting instrument for measuring common mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety (Lundin et al. 2016).