Inequalities in adolescent health and life satisfaction

The prime objectives of the Office of Research are to improve international understanding of issues relating to children’s rights and to help facilitate full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in developing, middle-income and industrialized countries. [...] To fill this research gap, this study analyses variation in the extent of inequality in the lower half of the distribution in five indicators of adolescent health and well-being – health symptoms, physical activity, healthy eating, unhealthy eating, and life satisfaction – across EU and/or OECD countries that took part in the latest cycle of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study. [...] First, it analyses the extent of variation in health and life-satisfaction between a child with a typical (median) outcome and a child in the lower half of the distribution in five indicators of adolescent health and well-being across 32 countries in the EU and/or the OECD that took part in the latest cycle of the HBSC study. [...] It is calculated as the sum of all observations below the median divided by the product of the median value and the number of observations below the median. [...] To measure the extent to which children in the lower half of the distribution fall behind an average child on a variety of ordinal indicators of health and well-being, we calculate the so-called ‘relative gap’ as the difference between the mean of the values below the median4 and the median, as a percentage of the median.