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Abstract
This study examined the importance of aspects of the school climate for adolescents' psychosomatic health using multilevel modelling. Analyses were based on 18,571 ninth-grade students distributed over 1,026 classes and 284 schools in the greater Stockholm area in 2004 and 2006. Both individual- and contextual-level associations between aspects of the school climate and student health were explored. While most of the aspects of the school climate under study were related to health at the individual level, only 2 of them seemed to convey an additional contextual effect reaching beyond the students who were directly affected. Thus, better health was found in classes where many students reported getting immediate teacher help with their schoolwork, and worse health was found in classes where harassment was more commonly reported. These findings remained when a number of school-contextual characteristics were adjusted for.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Stockholm City Administration's Prevention Centre (Precens) for giving us access to the data which made this study possible. In particular, we would like to thank Karin Svanberg for helpful advice in various matters concerning the Stockholm School Survey (Stockholmsenkäten). We would also like to thank Roger Celeste for valuable comments on the manuscript. The Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research has financed this study (Modin: FAS 2006-1637; Östberg: FAS 2006-0707).