Social inequalities
in health

Background: Self-reported mental health problems have increased among children and adolescents in many countries, including the Nordic, during recent decades. Sweden has the highest proportion of 15-year-olds reporting multiple health complaints among the Nordic countries. Sweden has also experienced the largest increase of income inequality among the Nordic countries during the last decades and has the highest income inequality in terms of the Gini coefficient and the at-risk-of-poverty rate.

Objectives: The aims were to examine socioeconomic inequalities in subjective health complaints (SHCs) and life satisfaction (LS) among adolescents in Sweden, compared to the other Nordic countries, during 2002−2018 and to explore whether SHC and LS were related to income inequality at the country level.

Methods: Data regarding 15-year-olds from the HBSC study from five survey rounds were used (n = 41,148). The HBSC Symptoms Checklist and Cantril’s ladder were used as measures of SHC and LS, respectively. The Family Affluence Scale, the Perceived Family Wealth item and the at-risk-of-poverty rate in each country were used as measures of socioeconomic conditions and country-level income inequality. 

Results: Socioeconomic inequalities in both SHC and LS were found in all Nordic countries: the largest in Iceland, followed by Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Country-level income inequality was associated with a higher prevalence of SHC and lower levels of LS in all countries. 

Conclusions: Interventions improving families’ socioeconomic conditions and reducing income inequality at the country-level are needed to improve mental health and reduce inequalities in mental health among adolescents in the Nordic countries.

Background: To date, research on gender differences in adolescents’ life satisfaction (LS) has reported inconsistent findings, with some studies detecting no gender gap, a higher LS in girls, or a higher LS in boys. 

Objectives: The present study aimed to (1) assess the extent to which LS has varied with gender since 2006 in Luxembourg, a high-income and gender-equal country; (2) estimate the predictive power of gender on LS when considering (a) gender alone, (b) sociodemographic factors only, and (c) additional factors having been found to affect LS; (3) examine whether the influence of the examined predictors on LS varied with gender.

Methods: Based on the data pertaining to the HBSC surveys conducted since 2006, I computed t-tests and estimates of effect size to assess the extent to which LS has varied with gender over the past two decades. Using data from the 2022 HBSC survey, I selected 20 demographic and psychosocial factors known to affect LS and performed hierarchical linear regression analysis to evaluate the predictive power of gender on LS. I reran the same analysis split by gender to evaluate potential gender difference in the influence of the examined factors on LS. 

Results: Findings revealed a consistent, albeit small, effect of gender on LS. When controlling for all my predictors, this effect vanished. Results also showed that, overall, the influence of the examined factors did not vary with gender.

Conclusion: The observed gender gap in LS may reflect gender differences in health-related issues and family support.

Background: previous research indicates contrasting findings regarding the association between school socioeconomic status (SES) and adolescents’ internalizing problems. Some studies report that higher levels of school SES are related to less internalizing problems, whereas others observed the opposite.

Objective(s): this study explores the association between school SES and internalizing problems and the extent to which this association is moderated by individual-level SES and country-level income inequality. In doing so, it also addresses possible mediating factors, particularly schoolwork pressure and classmate support.

Methods: Individual-level data came from 206,347 adolescents from 45 countries that participated in the 2017/2018 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey. The data had a three-level structure, with individuals nested within schools, which were further nested within countries/ regions. To account for this hierarchical structure and to capture variations across countries/ regions, multilevel models with random slopes were used.

Results: Multilevel analyses showed that higher levels of school SES were related to more internalizing problems. During the presentation, we will delve into the discussion of the findings of mediation and moderation.

Conclusion: Will be discussed during the presentation.

Background: Young people spend a considerable part of their lives at school and a lot of their social interactions take place in this context. 

The importance of school social support for students’ positive development and well-being has been highlighted by a variety of theoretical studies (Danielsen et al., 2009; García-Moya, 2020) including, for instance, a consistent positive association between teacher support and mental health regardless of demographic factors, country and perceptions of school performance when studying Spanish and English adolescents (Garcia-Moya et al., 2015). 

Moreover, high school work pressure and poor social support play a central role in worsening mental health outcomes (Bersia et al., 2022). 

Finally, various studies found that adolescent experience of the school culture and teacher support were associated with reduced likelihood of depressive symptoms (Joyce, Early, 2014), self-harming behaviours (Klemera et al., 2017), and suicidal ideation (Madjar et al., 2018) during adolescence.