A new measure for infant mental health screening:development and initial validation

BACKGROUND: Mental health problems are a major public health challenges, and strategies of early prevention are needed. Effective prevention depends on feasible and validated measures of screening and intervention. Previous research has demonstrated potentials for infant mental health screening by community health nurses (CHN) in existing service settings in Denmark. This study was conducted to describe the development of a service setting based measure to screen for infant mental health problems, to investigate problems identified by the measure and assess the validity and feasibility in existing public health settings. METHODS: Experts within the field developed a short, feasible and comprehensive measure. A consecutive sample of 2973 infants from 11 municipalities around the city of Copenhagen was screened at 9–10 months. Face validity and feasibility were evaluated among CHNs. Data on child and family factors and the results of screening were included in descriptive analyses. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to assess content validity. RESULTS: The measure identified problems of communication and interaction in 20.7% of the children, problems of eating in 20.1%, attention problems in 15.9% and problems of emotional regulation in 14.3%. Significant gender differences were seen. EFA demonstrated that among 27 items 11 items were clustering into five areas: Problems of eating, emotions, attention, language and communication and attachment, respectively. High face validity and feasibility was demonstrated, and the participation was 91%. CONCLUSIONS: The new measure shows potentials for infant mental health screening. However, further exploration of construct validity and reliability is needed

Emerging trends in gerontology and geriatrics: Implications for the self-care of the elderly

Increases in the world's older population have posed a significant challenge to available health care resources. For many older people, informal initiatives represent a necessary, rather than an optional health care strategy in the absence of alternatives. Those individuals with the greatest health and economic dependencies are often held responsible for their reliance on subsidized long-term care services. This tendency to blame the victim appears to transcend fundamental philosophic differences which have traditionally distinguished some collectivist and individualist societies. Although health care has been viewed traditionally by health professionals as their domain, self-care and lay initiatives have recently been recognized by professionals as important to the health care of different population groups including older people. The concept of self-care has been used in various ways by different people to describe a wide range of personal health behaviors encompassing lay care, self-help, enlightened consumerism, and various preventive measures as antidotes to the impairments of old age. This paper reports some of the outcomes of an international project which reviewed geriatric self-care in different countries and health care systems. Various influences on the evolution of interest in geriatric self-care were identified including: similarities and differences in health care systems: demographic changes; cohort differences; the emergence of professionals with specialized training in geriatric health care; and, the salience of biomedical models in addressing the health problems of aging. The role of professionals, especially those trained in geriatrics, is examined with an acknowledgment of the importance of a self-care strategy that is independent of professional dominance. The increasing inadequacy of health care systems to deal with a burgeoning older population makes it especially important for professionals and consumers to work together on the development of health care initiatives which decrease dependency on formal services and support positive health behavior. As more people move into old age, an increasing number will be better informed about their own health and about the health care system, and also more interested in prevention and health maintenance. They may also be less likely to defer to the professional's judgment in making health care decisions. This paper concludes with a caution regarding self-care as a potential 'two-edged sword.' For the somewhat healthier and better educated elderly, effective self-care will be an important tool of prevention, health maintenance, and consumer protection. For the chronically impaired and most dependent elderly, self-treatment may be their only, and often inadequate resource.self-care elderly political systems bio-medical model geriatric care

Loneliness and Scholastic Self-Beliefs among Adolescents: A population-based survey.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research on 18/10/2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2021.1983865Loneliness has previously been linked to cognitive and attentional bias, and such biases may have a detrimental impact on perceived scholastic self-beliefs. Little is known about the relationship in school-aged adolescents. The current study examined the association between loneliness and scholastic self-beliefs in a nationally representative Danish sample of adolescents (aged 11-, 13- and 15 years, n = 3815, collected by the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study (HBSC, 2014). Through binary logistic regressions, results demonstrated that higher levels of loneliness, measured by a single item and a composite score, were associated with poorer self-reported achievement perception, higher feelings of school dissatisfaction, and greater feelings of school pressure. Results also suggested gender played a moderating role. The current study highlights the importance of loneliness for scholastic self-beliefs, and provides a novel insight by utilising distinct loneliness measures. The implications, in relation to research and practise, are discussed

Is victimization from bullying associated with medicine use among adolescents? A nationally representative cross-sectional survey in Denmark

OBJECTIVE. The goal was to examine whether being a victim of bullying was associated with medicine use, taking into account the increased prevalence of physical and psychological symptoms. METHODS. The study population included all students in grades 5, 7, and 9 (mean ages: 11.6, 13.6, and 15.6 years, respectively) in a random sample of schools in Denmark (participation rate: 88.5%; N = 5205). The students reported health problems, medicine use, bullying, and a range of psychosocial conditions in an anonymous standardized questionnaire. The outcome measure was self-reported medicine use for headache, stomachache, difficulties in getting to sleep, and nervousness. The determinant was frequency of exposure to bullying, measured with 1 item. RESULTS. In multivariate models adjusted for age and social class, we found that adolescent victims of bullying used medicine for pains and psychological problems more often than did adolescents who were not bullied. The increased odds of using medicine were not explained by the higher prevalence of symptoms among the bullied children. CONCLUSIONS. We found victimization from bullying to be associated with medicine use, even when we controlled for the higher prevalence of symptoms among bullied victims. The medications that adolescents use can have adverse effects, in addition to the potentially health-damaging effects of bullying. Policy makers, health care professionals, and school staff should be aware that the adolescent victims of bullying are prone to excess use of medicine, and preventive actions should be taken to decrease the level of bullying as well as the use of medicine among adolescents

Researching health inequalities in adolescents: the development of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) family affluence scale

Socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent health have been little studied until recently, partly due to the lack of appropriate and agreed upon measures for this age group. The difficulties of measuring adolescent socioeconomic status (SES) are both conceptual and methodological. Conceptually, it is unclear whether parental SES should be used as a proxy, and if so, which aspect of SES is most relevant. Methodologically, parental SES information is difficult to obtain from adolescents resulting in high levels of missing data. These issues led to the devlopment of a new measure, the Family Affluence Scale (FAS), in the context of an international study on adolescent health, the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Study. The paper reviews the evolution of the measure over the past 10 years and its utility in examining and explaining health related inequalities at national and cross-national levels in over 30 countries in Europe and North America. We present an overview of HBSC papers published to date that examine FAS-related socioeconomic inequalities in health and health behaviour, using data from the HBSC study. Findings suggest consistent inequalities in self-reported health, psychosomatic symptoms, physical activity and aspects of eating habits at both the individual and Country level. FAS has recently been adopted, and in some cases adapted, by other research and policy related studies and this work is also reviewed. Finally, ongoing I-AS validation work is described together with ideas for future development of the measure. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Lonely, but Not Alone: Qualitative Study among Immigrant and Native-Born Adolescents

This paper explores loneliness as it is understood and experienced by adolescents, with a special focus on the importance of their migration status. We recruited students from five schools following a maximum variation sampling scheme, and we conducted 15 semi-structured, individual interviews with eighth-grade adolescents (aged 14–15 years) that were immigrants, descendants, and with a Danish majority background. A thematic analysis was applied with a special focus on differences and similarities in understanding and experiencing loneliness between adolescents with diverse migration status. The results showed more similarities than differences in loneliness. Generally, loneliness was described as an adverse feeling, varying in intensity and duration, and participants referenced distressing emotions. Feeling lonely was distinguished from being alone and characterized as an invisible social stigma. A variety of perceived social deficiencies were emphasized as causing loneliness, emerging in the interrelation between characteristics of the individual and their social context. The results add to the current literature by highlighting that it is not the presence of specific individual characteristics that causes loneliness; instead, loneliness is dependent on the social contexts the individual is embedded in. Differences across migration status were few and related to variations in the adolescents’ individual characteristics. The findings highlight the importance of (1) studying the characteristics of both the individual and the social context in research on the antecedents to adolescents’ loneliness, and (2) applying this perspective in other studies on the importance of migration status