School climate and psychosomatic health: a multilevel analysis

Abstract

This study examined the importance of aspects of the school climate for adolescents' psychosomatic health using multilevel modelling. Analyses were based on 18,571 ninth-grade students distributed over 1,026 classes and 284 schools in the greater Stockholm area in 2004 and 2006. Both individual- and contextual-level associations between aspects of the school climate and student health were explored. While most of the aspects of the school climate under study were related to health at the individual level, only 2 of them seemed to convey an additional contextual effect reaching beyond the students who were directly affected. Thus, better health was found in classes where many students reported getting immediate teacher help with their schoolwork, and worse health was found in classes where harassment was more commonly reported. These findings remained when a number of school-contextual characteristics were adjusted for.