Abstract
For Chinese left-behind adolescents, school-based relational and academic experiences may be especially important for prosocial development because prolonged parental absence due to migration can reduce the consistency of everyday parental support. Yet, little is known about how teacher-student relationships, academic self-efficacy, and prosocial behavior are prospectively linked within adolescents over time. Guided by reciprocal determinism, the present study examined between-person and within-person associations among teacher-student relationships, academic self-efficacy, and prosocial behavior, as well as longitudinal indirect effects through academic self-efficacy. Multigroup analyses were further conducted to examine sex differences in the lagged paths. The sample included 929 Chinese left-behind adolescents from four rural secondary schools in Yunnan Province, southwestern China. At baseline, all participants were in Grade 8 (Mage = 12.91 years, SD = 0.31; 50.6% girls), and they completed three assessments at approximately six-month intervals from September 2024 to September 2025. The random-intercept cross-lagged panel model showed positive between-person associations among teacher-student relationships, academic self-efficacy, and prosocial behavior. At the within-person level, higher-than-usual teacher-student relationships at Time 1 predicted higher-than-usual academic self-efficacy and prosocial behavior at Time 2, while higher-than-usual academic self-efficacy at Time 1 predicted higher-than-usual teacher-student relationships and prosocial behavior at Time 2. From Time 2 to Time 3, higher-than-usual prosocial behavior predicted higher-than-usual teacher-student relationships and academic self-efficacy. Academic self-efficacy did not mediate the prospective within-person association between teacher-student relationships and prosocial behavior, and multigroup analyses indicated that the lagged paths did not differ significantly between boys and girls. Taken together, separating within-person change from stable individual differences revealed a temporally ordered pattern among left-behind adolescents.These findings may inform school-based efforts to support the relational, academic, and prosocial development of left-behind adolescents.