Original articleSelf-rated health among U.S. adolescents
Section snippets
The perception of health among adolescents
In a recent article, Bailis and colleagues [9] describe two distinct understandings of SRH. When asked to assess his or her overall health status, an individual may take stock of relatively immediate physical cues such as energy levels, the presence or absence of pain, or recent changes in health status (improvements or declines). In this case, SRH can be understood as a spontaneous assessment of overall health that is intimately related to current health status. Alternatively, changes in
Data and measures
All data used in these analyses come from Waves I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Add Health is a school-based study of youth originally in grades 7 through 12 [21]. All high schools that included an 11th grade (and their respective feeder schools) with an enrollment of at least 30 students were included in the population of schools. These schools were then stratified by region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West), urbanicity (urban, suburban, rural),
Results
Table 1 presents a cross-tabulation of SRH responses across the two interviews. An examination of the main diagonal of this simple matrix reveals that more than one-half (7018 of 13,551) of adolescents interviewed reported consistent SRH. An additional 40% reported either 1 point better (n = 2799) or 1 point worse (n = 2545). However, roughly 9% of adolescents reported SRH levels that differed by at least two values. For example, 209 of the 913 (nearly one in four) adolescents who reported
Discussion and conclusion
Using a large, nationally representative sample of adolescents interviewed at two points in time (roughly 1 year apart) this article finds that self-rated health reported by adolescent respondents is moderately stable. And, whereas SRH among adults is characterized as both an enduring self-concept and a spontaneous health assessment [9], SRH among adolescents, particularly among younger adolescents, appears to be more appropriately characterized as an enduring self-concept.
These findings speak
Acknowledgments
This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by a grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from seventeen other agencies. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina
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2024, Social Science and MedicineHealth status among NEET adolescents and young adults in the United States, 2016–2018
2021, SSM - Population HealthCitation Excerpt :The extant literature on the determinants of SRH during adolescence and young adulthood finds associations with SES (actual and perceived), education, race/ethnicity, family relationships, school conditions, chronic conditions, and body mass index (Almgren, Magarati, & Mogford, 2009; Heard, Gorman, & Kapinus, 2008; Vingilis, Wade, & Seeley, 2002). In addition, research has observed SRH to be relatively stable during the transition to adulthood (Boardman, 2006; Fosse & Haas, 2009), making it an ideal outcome to explore NEET differences in health as age differences are not expected among this population. There is reason to believe that NEETs may be uniquely disadvantaged regarding their health status, due to socioeconomic characteristics and health behaviors.
Subjective health in adolescence: Comparing the reliability of contemporaneous, retrospective, and proxy reports of overall health
2021, Social Science ResearchCitation Excerpt :However, the widespread use of subjective health – and SRH in particular – is not commensurate with our knowledge of its measurement properties (Grol-Prokopczyk et al., 2011; Hardy et al., 2014; Idler and Cartwright 2018). Perhaps most importantly, the reliability of SRH has received relatively limited attention (Boardman 2006; Zajacova and Dowd 2011), as the majority of studies use SRH and similar survey items without accounting for measurement error. Reliability is a well-established issue in survey research, and refers to the “consistency of measurement; ” in our context, it refers to the extent we could expect people to give the same response to a question on SRH if we could somehow repeatedly ask this question but remove the individuals’ memories of their last response (Lazarsfeld 1959).