Prediction of educational achievement, behaviour and health at school using information from infancy health service.

Abstract

The study is a 12-year follow-up of all risk-children (652) and a random sample of control-children (626) born during 1968 in a delimited geographical area (Aarhus county). Information from the infancy period was obtained from the health nurses' schematic records and were concerned with family background variables, life events which had occurred during the first year of life, perinatal risk-factors and indices of health care during the first year of life. Information at 12 years of age was obtained through the records in the school health service. Multivariate predictor analyses were performed. Significant educational difficulties, which 16.6% experienced, were pronouncedly predicted from indices of low socio-economic status, child abuse and neglect and male sex. The prevalences at 12 years of age of mental disorders psychosomatic (6.7%), behaviour disorder (3.3%), and mental retardation (1.3%) were predictable from indices of social and psychosocial stress including the health nurses' assessment of inadequate care during infancy period, but with some differences among the diagnostic groups. The results show that unfavourable social factors, psychosocial stress and inadequate care are informative variables for delimitation of risk-groups in infancy.