A life course approach to the assessment of socioeconomic differences in health during adolescence

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a lack of socioeconomic differences in health during adolescence in a Canadian population and to determine whether these differences re-emerge when adolescents reach young adulthood.

For this study, analysis was limited to 1302 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 in the original survey, and 933 participants whose age at follow-up ranged from 17 to 21 years. The two waves of this survey offer the opportunity to investigate the lack of health inequalities in adolescence and re-emergence in young adulthood. Four health measures were analyzed using four measures of parental socioeconomic position. Results for the two waves of the survey reveal that, contrary to the hypothesis, a number of measures of parental socioeconomic position are significantly associated with health in adolescence while there are only a few significant relationships between parental socioeconomic position and health in young adulthood.

An additional aim of this study was to determine whether significant changes occurred in the relationship between parental socioeconomic position and health as adolescents made the transition to young adulthood. The pooled cross-section, which creates person-period observations (N = 1866) from individuals who participate in both waves of the survey, represents an exploratory approach to this research question. The results of this analysis are inconclusive, although the overall lack of significant relationships may indicate that there are no significant differences in the pattern of health inequalities during the two developmental periods. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)