Alienation and health in adolescents : an original evaluation tool

Abstract

The present work aims to construct and validate a tool enabling to evaluate alienation in Portuguese adolescents. Participants were a group of adolescents that participated in the Portuguese survey of the European study Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC). For this study, only adolescents from the 8th and 10th grades were included in the sample, comprising 3869 students. The results show a good adequacy of the confirmatory factorial analysis (CFA) model. This model revealed 3 subscales proposals—Demotivation, Isolation and Instability, and a full scale—Total Alienation. When analyzed in relation to other variables (gender, grade, wellbeing indicator and risk indicator), the alienation subscales showed an association between alienation and risk. These results are consistent with other studies about alienation which emphasizes that having good social relationships is associated with higher levels of wellbeing and quality of life and less involvement in risk behaviours by young people