Explainable AI Modeling of Adolescents’ Psychological Adjustment Using Coping Styles, Social Support Quality, and Life Stress Exposure

Objective: The objective of this study was to develop and interpret an explainable artificial intelligence model to predict adolescents’ psychological adjustment from coping styles, social support quality, and life stress exposure in a representative sample of Iraqi secondary school students. Methods and Materials: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 612 adolescents aged 14–18 years recruited from public secondary schools in Baghdad, Najaf, and Basra using multistage cluster sampling. Participants completed validated measures assessing psychological adjustment, coping styles, perceived social support quality, and life stress exposure. Data were preprocessed through normalization, missing-value imputation, and outlier screening. Machine learning models including random forest, extreme gradient boosting, and multilayer perceptron neural networks were trained using five-fold cross-validation. Model interpretability was achieved through SHapley Additive exPlanations, permutation feature importance, and partial dependence analyses. Findings: The XGBoost model demonstrated the highest predictive performance (R² = 0.76, RMSE = 0.29, MAE = 0.22). Social support quality emerged as the strongest positive predictor of psychological adjustment, followed by problem-focused coping. Life stress exposure exerted a substantial negative effect. Avoidance coping significantly predicted poorer adjustment, whereas emotion-focused coping displayed nonlinear effects depending on stress levels. Interaction analysis revealed that high social support significantly buffered the adverse effects of life stress on psychological adjustment. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that adolescents’ psychological adjustment is governed by complex nonlinear interactions among coping strategies, social support, and stress exposure, and that explainable artificial intelligence offers a powerful framework for modeling these processes with high predictive accuracy and theoretical transparency.