Perceived health and health related behaviours of Portuguese adolescents: an analysis by sex and age

Abstract

Objective: To compare the perception of health status of teenagers and their behaviours according to the sex and age. Methods: The “Inventory of adolescents’ health related behaviours” was applied to 8,480 Portuguese adolescents (52% female and 48% male). Results: The data showed that 3/4 of the youngsters made a positive evaluation of their health, being the boys those who better evaluated themselves. As the age of the subjects increased, there was a decrease, on both sexes, in the percentage of youngsters that positively evaluated their health. In what concerns the relation between health perception and adolescents’ behaviours, a strong positive association between health protecting behaviours and positive health perception was observed; but was also equally evident the great percentage of youngsters that, although presented high risk behaviours, also made a positive evaluation of their health. Conclusions: Although the great majority of the youngsters make a positive evaluation of their health and there is an evidence of a positive relation between protective health behaviours and health perception, a great percentage of adolescents do not relate their risk behaviours with losses to their health. These results alerts to the need of precociously work with the youngsters important concepts such are those of risk behaviours or health protection.