School-related stress, support, and subjective health complaints among early adolescents: a multilevel approach

This study investigated the relationship between shared psychosocial school environment and subjective health complaints. A representative sample of 1585 Norwegian grade 8 students (mean age 13·5 years) from 82 schoolclasses completed scales on health complaints, academic stress, the teacher and classmate support scale, decision control, and noise and disturbance in class. Multilevel analysis (MlwiN) revealed that level of health complaints varied across schoolclasses (ICC=5·6%). School class differences in psychosocial environment accounted for 40% of the between-schoolclass variance in health complaints. Tests of cross-level interaction showed a statistically significant interaction between mean schoolclass-level of classmate support and individual level of academic stress. Findings suggest that shared schoolclass contextual factors may have main and stress-moderating effects on adolescent health complaints.