Relative socio-economic position and meaning and purpose in life in adolescents: An intangible cost of social inequalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Having a sense of meaning in life supports adolescent health but is affected by the experiences of wealth or poverty. We examined its associations with relative advantage (RA) and relative deprivation (RD) in a sample of Canadian adolescents (n=17,634) using survey data from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study. We calculated RA and RD using all other schoolmates as reference groups in 238 schools. Descriptively, RA was associated with greater meaning and purpose and RD was associated with less. Regression-based estimates of prevalence ratios (PR) revealed more nuanced patterns. RD was associated with less of a sense of meaning and purpose in females and gender-diverse youth only. RA was associated with a risk of low meaning and purpose in females (PR 0.77; 95% CI: 0.61 to 0.98), with similar trends in males and gender diverse students that did not achieve significance. Although the association was not pronounced at the ecological (school) level, the negative associations with RD were stronger in more unequal schools. To illustrate, in schools of high wealth inequality, RD was most strongly associated with having low meaning and purpose in females (PR 1.59; 95% CI:1.20 to 2.11) and gender diverse adolescents (PR 1.97, 95% CI: 0.90 to 4.33), with no statistically significant effect in males. These patterns reveal the salience of proximal socioeconomic reference cues for adolescents and offer new insights into why inequalities in health and wellbeing are so challenging to address in youth populations. They also underscore the importance of both socioeconomic position and wealth distribution within school settings, providing impetus for thought and change. • Having a sense of meaning and purpose in life is an intangible resource that supports adolescent health • This national study demonstrates that having a sense of meaning and purpose in life is unequally distributed in adolescent populations • Girls and gender-diverse youth in a position of relative deprivation compared to all other schoolmates reported lower meaning and purpose in life • Adolescents who were relatively advantaged compared to all other schoolmates reported a higher sense of meaning and purpose in life • The negative effects of relative deprivation were especially pronounced in schools of high wealth inequality
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".