Socioeconomic status, social‐cultural values, life stress, and health behaviors in a national sample of adolescents

Abstract

Adolescence is a developmental period during which time individuals adopt health behaviors that affect their lifelong health and disease risk. Socioeconomic status, social–cultural values, and stress have all been hypothesized to play a role in this association, but very few studies have examined how these factors interrelate and explain differences in health behaviors in adolescence. To address this issue, we assessed youths’ socioeconomic status, social–cultural values, life stress levels across seven domains, and health behaviors in a national sample of 1,830 high school seniors living in the four largest cities in Croatia. Structural equation modelling examined the extent to which stress mediates the effects of socioeconomic status and social– cultural values on positive and negative health behaviors. As hypothesized, stress levels significantly mediated associations between youths’ socioeconomic status, social–cultural values, and healthy and unhealthy habits. Additionally, whereas better socioeconomic status predicted less stress, greater social–cultural value on achieving a “good life” predicted more stress. More stress, in turn, was associated with engaging in fewer healthy behaviors for both males and females, and more unhealthy behaviors for males. Socioeconomic status and social–cultural values thus appear to influence stress levels, which may in turn affect adolescents’ health behaviors and, potentially, their lifespan health.

Unhealthy Food and Psychological Stress: The Association between Ultra-Processed Food Consumption and Perceived Stress in Working-Class Young Adults

“…Stressed people may engage in health-risk behaviors such as unhealthy eating, smoking, and drinking alcohol. Risky-but often pleasurable-behaviors are ways to cope with stress [8][9][10][11][12][13]. A recent study conducted with Brazilian workers showed that high levels of perceived stress were associated with smoking, obesity, and the co-occurrence of health-risk behaviors [14].…”

An Assessment of Mental Wellbeing and Health-Related Quality of Life Among Youth Living in Central Mexico

“…Surprisingly, parental education, which was used as a proxy for socioeconomic status in this study, was not significant in any of the models. Socioeconomic status often plays a key role in individuals' health behaviors (Chen & Miller, 2013;Milas, Klaric, Malnar, Šupe-Domic, & Slavich, 2019;Nandi, Glymour, & Subramanian, 2014). It is likely that the homogeneous economic status of families from which our sample was drawn is the explanation for this unexpected result.…”

Chronic Kidney Disease

“…Data on 32,981 elderly people in Japan also found that both men and women of low SES were more likely to walk <30 min/day. This finding was true for 47.3% of men with <6 years of education compared with 33.9% of men with ≥13 years of education [33].…”

“…Lower family income was associated with higher severe uncertainty stress (OR 1.25; 95% CI, 1.06-1.49) [32]. Both men and women with low SES were shown to experience more stress than those with high SES [33]. Second, people with low SES may be less knowledgeable with regard to information and resources for healthy behavior.…”

“…Physical activity also counteracts many of the metabolic disturbances that promote the progression of CKD [37]. It has been shown that exercise habits are also related to SES [24,25,33,38]. Participants with a higher educational level are more likely to be physically active and involved in sports [38].…”