HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE AND PSYCHOSOCIAL FUNCTIONING OF SCHOOLCHILDREN’S: SCREENING ASSESSMENT METHODS

Abstract

. In modern medicine, quality of life related to health is considered as the main tool of modern population studies of health and the impact of social, environmental, psychological, and other factors and is an integrated criterion of physical, psychological, and social functioning. However, so far the researchers have not reached a final conclusion on the definition of psychosocial dysfunction, so its understanding as a state of emotional and behavioral disorders that lie in the plane of internalizing or externalizing features is becoming increasingly important. Therefore, the aim of the study was to increase the effectiveness of determining psychosocial dysfunction and quality of life in adolescent schoolchildren by analyzing the results of the screening study. Using the Ukrainian adapted version of the SF-36 and PSC-Ukr questionnaires, 101 high school students and 87 of their parents were surveyed. Processing of statistical data was performed in the licensed software package SPSS Statistic v. 20 using one-way analysis of variance and correlation. The highest level of quality of life associated with the health of high school students was determined by physical functioning, regardless of gender, year of study, and age of students. The level of quality of life on all scales characterizing the psychological component was lower than sufficient. The transition to the graduating year was accompanied by a compensated tension of the system of assessing one’s own health by the physical component with a consistently high level of integration of the psychological component. The most relevant are the indicators of health related quality of life, related to psychological, emotional, social functioning, and their reflection lies in the plane of internalizing signs of anxiety, depression, intrapersonal problems in adolescents. The combined use of the Ukrainian adapted versions of the SF-36 and PSC-Ukr questionnaires are effective in determining the quality of life and psychosocial functioning of school-age adolescents. The obtained results should be considered important for the creation of differentiated programs of psychological intervention to overcome prenosological manifestations of psychosocial dysfunction in order to prevent the development of maladaptive disorders of emotions and behavior in the future.

Keywords

• adolescents
• health-related quality of life
• psychosocial dysfunction
• screening evaluation methods.