Changes in self-reported emotional and behavioral problems of Polish adolescents in 2000 and 2013.

Łukasz Konowałek,Tomasz Srebnicki

doi:10.12740/pp/onlinefirst/142417

Abstract

This study assesses 13-year changes in self-reported emotional and behavioral problems of Polish adolescents. Even though we already assessed time-related changes in emotional problems of Polish 16-year-olds, a comparison covering more age groups has been lacking. Youth Self Report (YSR) questionnaire was used to assess emotional and behavioral problems. We compared median scores and ran regression models to see whether age and gender influenced the observed changes. We ran a logistic regression analysis for deviant scores. We found that median scores on most scales were higher after 13 years albeit the differences were quite small. We found that gender moderated the effect of age on scale scores. Score on the deviant range in attention problems and thought problems were 1.5 more frequent in the 2013 group. We did not detect significant differences in self-reported emotional and behavioral problems of Polish adolescents between 2000 and 2013. We detected different coping strategies for boys and girls: boys reported more problems with delinquency and more externalizing behaviors whereas girls reported more problems on each scale.

Highlights

The goal of this paper is to examine time-related changes in self-reported emotional and psychological problems of Polish adolescents
Current data from different countries show mixed results with many studies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17] reporting worsening of mental condition of adolescents, some of them reporting an improvement [7, 5, 8,9,10, 13, 14], and a few reporting no changes at all [11]
Even though we already looked into the changes in self-reported psychological problems of Polish 16-year-olds [18], we could not report data on a wider spectrum of Łukasz Konowałek, Tomasz Srebnicki age groups

Summary

Introduction

The goal of this paper is to examine time-related changes in self-reported emotional and psychological problems of Polish adolescents. Even though we already looked into the changes in self-reported psychological problems of Polish 16-year-olds [18], we could not report data on a wider spectrum of Łukasz Konowałek, Tomasz Srebnicki age groups. This study attempts to fill in this gap by comparing self-reported problems of Polish adolescents of different ages across a 13-year time period

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion