Subjective Health

Health statistics show improvement in objective measures of health and at the same time there is an increase in the subjective health complaints (Buckingham, 2008). The term “subjective health complaints” is employed to explain a variety of health symptoms experienced by the individual with or without a defined diagnosis, which can vary from occasional health complaints to clinical manifestations and may impair everyday functioning (Haugland et al., 2001). The terms ‘medically unexplained’, ‘functional’ and ‘psychosomatic’ have additionally been used by scholars to explain similar constellation of symptoms. Nevertheless, the experts prefer the term "subjective health complaints" due neutral qualities, as it does not allow any assumptions about

The most well established and constant finding across relevant cross-national studies is that subjective health complaints are both gender and age dependent, indicating that females tend to complain more about their health, and these complaints increase with age for both genders. (Haugland, 2001; Torsheim, 2001, Stock et al, 2008; Torsheim et al, 2006; Petanidou, 2012).

Socio-demographic characteristics, lifestyle factors associated with occupation do not explain enough about the differences in subjective health complaints, thus suggesting that psychological factors may be more important to explain subjective health complaints (Ihlebæk, Eriksen, 2003).

High prevalence of multiple health complaints among adolescents may persist and even be related to different health issues later into adulthood (Dunn, 2006; Gregory et al,

The interviews revealed that the presence of health complaints negatively influences subjective well-being and functioning in daily life. Adolescents were consistent in how they defined different symptoms, suggesting that adolescents have a common frame of reference when they rate their frequency of symptoms. However, adolescents differed in their lay perspectives on the causes of such symptoms. In some cases explanations were consistent with a stress-model of health complaints. In other cases, adolescents attributed their health complaints to developmental processes, such as growing pains, or ergonomic factors such as low quality of air in classrooms etc. The quantitative analysis of this study showed acceptable test-retest reliability for the HBSC symptom scale as a whole (Pearson-r = .79), and somewhat lower reliability for the single symptoms (Pearson-r = 0.61 to