Socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent health complaints: A multilevel latent class analysis in 45 countries
Open accessAbstract
Our study evaluated the relationship between adolescent health complaints and socioeconomic position in 45 countries. Data are from the 2017/2018 international Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey which used proportionate sampling among adolescents aged 11 to 15 years old (n=228,979). Multilevel, multinomial regression analysis assessed the association between the multilevel latent classes with socioeconomic status (SES; at the household and country level). Three distinct latent classes were identified: No Complaints, Psychological Complaints, and a Physical and Psychological Complaints class; where, low household SES was highest for the physical and psychological complaints class. The findings suggest that health promotion policies and interventions among adolescents should consider the specific needs of adolescents living with low household SES as they report more subjective health complaints.
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Social-economic status has been shown to be a factor on the types of health complaints of patient populations.
“On the other hand, social-economic status has been shown to be a factor on the types of health complaints of patient populations38,39.”
From Aci-bench: a Novel Ambient Clinical Intelligence Dataset for Benchmarking Automatic Visit Note Generation (2023) · cites this paper as [38]
The Results (Regression analyses) show that adolescents with the lowest household SES were more likely to belong to psychological and combined physical-and-psychological complaint classes than to the no-complaints class. This supports an association between SES and complaint types, but the study surveyed adolescents aged 11–15, not patient populations generally, and does not establish a causal effect. (LLM, conf=0.85)
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- Authors
- Hammami, N., Gobina, I., Lukoševičiūtė, J., Kostičová, M., Lyyra, N., Gariepy, G., Šmigelskas, K., Baban, A., Malinowska-Cieślik, M., & Elgar, F. J.
- Affiliations
- University of Regina (CA)
- Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LT)
- Comenius University Bratislava (SK)
- University of Jyväskylä (FI)
- Jagiellonian University (PL)
- McGill University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Hammami, Nour
- ORCID
- Venue
- Current Psychology
- Published
- 2022-04-01
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 22
- Pages
- 18590-18601
- ISSN
- 1046-1310 (ISSN-L)
- 1936-4733
- PMC
- PMC8972899
- OpenAlex
- W4220681679
- Cited by
- 9
- References
- 49
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 1.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Current Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Jagiellonian University Repository (Jagiellonian University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Jyväskylä University Digital Archive (University of Jyväskylä) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- University of Glasgow (2017/2018)
- Universitetet i Bergen
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Adolescent Health and Behaviors
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
- Keywords
- socioeconomic disparities, socioeconomic status, psychological complaints, physical complaints, cross-national comparison, health promotion policy, Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey
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