Trends - Emotional Health and Well-being (including Bullying)
Emotional Health & Well-being (including Bullying) 1983-2003
This report is to be updated and is currently not available for sale.
The following is a summary of the report written in 2004 by SHEU covering the period 1983-2003
When looking over the figures from twenty years, we find that young people in recent years are...
* less likely to keep problems to themselves, although around 25% of 14-15 year old males still keep family problems and problems with friends to themselves
* less likely to share family problems with a friend, although this option has always been the most popular for older females
* less likely to be bullied as a result of a particular event, although up to 17% of 10-11 year old females report being 'called nasty names, often/every day in the last month'
* less likely to worry about the 'way they look' although it is still reported to be the main problem for around 50% of 14-15 year old females
* less likely to worry about HIV/AIDS (in 1993, 34% of older females worried 'quite a lot/a lot' and in 2003 this figure has reduced to 8%)
* more likely to share school problems with mum and dad, or a teacher or a friend more pupils are getting higher self-esteem scores and 14-15 year old males score the highest
* more likely to worry 'quite a lot/ a lot' about school and career problems - up to 39% (2001) of older females worried about these problems
* more likely to feel in control of their health, with males scoring higher than females
* more likely to feel more satisfied with their lives - 15% more 12-13 year old females report being satisfied 'a lot' (12% in 1995 to 27% in 2003)
...when compared with figures from previous years.
SHEU is an independent research and publishing organisation. Each year the Schools Health Education Unit supports surveys in hundreds of communities nation wide and compiles the results from these surveys in the series ‘Young People in…’. The survey services began in the late 1970s and have been very widely used, and from the data bases from 1983 onwards we are publishing data to allow examination of trends.
Our annual survey sample is ‘accidental’ and not deliberate and is therefore not a representative 'national sample' in a research sense. It is however very large, and within any one community is never less than 40% of the community and often greater than 70%. The aim is to provide robust data for the community in which the data are collected and used. With the large sample it comes as no surprise to discover that Unit’s annual data compilations usually match the outcomes of orthodox procedures for the collection of 'national data'.
