Abstract
Health-related behaviors in adolescence establish trajectories of risk for obesity and chronic degenerative diseases, and they represent an important pathway through which socio-economic environments shape patterns of morbidity and mortality. Most behaviors that promote health involve making choices that may not pay off until the future, but the factors that predict an individual's investment in future health are not known. In this paper we consider whether expectations for the future in two domains relevant to adolescents in the U.S.-perceived chances of living to middle age and perceived chances of attending college-are associated with an individual's engagement in behaviors that protect health in the long run. We focus on adolescence as an important life stage during which habits formed may shape trajectories of disease risk later in life. We use data from a large, nationally representative sample of American youth (the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health) to predict levels of physical activity, fast food consumption, and cigarette smoking in young adulthood in relation to perceived life chances in adolescence, controlling for baseline health behaviors and a wide range of potentially confounding factors. We found that adolescents who rated their chances of attending college more highly exercised more frequently and smoked fewer cigarettes in young adulthood. Adolescents with higher expectations of living to age 35 smoked fewer cigarettes as young adults. Parental education was a significant predictor of perceived life chances, as well as health behaviors, but for each outcome the effects of perceived life chances were independent of, and often stronger than, parental education. Perceived life chances in adolescence may therefore play an important role in establishing individual trajectories of health, and in contributing to social gradients in population health.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 391-398 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Social Science and Medicine |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2011 |
Funding
This project was supported by Grant Number R01HD053731 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development . Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website ( http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth ). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.
Keywords
- Adolescents
- Cardiovascular disease
- Future certainty
- Health inequalities
- Human development
- Obesity
- Risk behavior
- Smoking
- Time perspective
- USA
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Health(social science)
- History and Philosophy of Science
