The Relationship of Somatic Symptoms and Self-esteem in Adolescence.
- Author:
Mi Suk LEE
1
;
Young CHOI
;
Ji Suk YOU
Author Information
1. Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine Seonam University, Namwon, Korea.
- Publication Type:Original Article
- Keywords:
Adolescent symptom checklist;
Internal consistency;
Self-esteem;
Correlation
- MeSH:
Adolescent*;
Depression;
Female;
Gwangju;
Humans;
Male;
Surveys and Questionnaires;
Reproducibility of Results
- From:Journal of Korean Neuropsychiatric Association
2000;39(2):323-333
- CountryRepublic of Korea
- Language:Korean
-
Abstract:
OBJECTIVES: The aims of this study were to develop the Korean version of Adolescent Symptom Checklist(ASC) which was devised by Thomas et al.(1988), to investigate descriptive data of somatic symptoms which our adolescents reported and to find the correlation between somatic symptom and self-esteem. And furthermore we compared our results with those of foreign countries. METHOD: The subject group was composed of 794 students who go to commercial or academic high school in kwangju city. They completed self rating questionnaires which include ASC, Self-esteem scale and somatization and depression subscales of SCL-90-R. The descriptive statistics, reliability and validity of ASC, means of somatic symptom and self-esteem for each group and correlation of somatic symptom and self-esteem were examined. We would consider an adolescent as belonging to high risk group if their score on the ASC was one or more standard deviations above the mean. RESULTS: Seventeen point eight percent of all subjects were in high risk group and the pacentage was higher than 11-15% of foreign countries. Sixty nine point four percent had visited to hospital due to their somatic symptoms during the past 12months and 26.2% were treated by doctors recently. Internal consistency(Cronbach a .89) was high. Inter-item correlations were all positive and ranged from .09 to .58 with a mean of .29 and item-total correlations varied from .35 to .60 with a mean of .48. The ASC was significantly correlated with the somatization and depression subscales of SCL-90-R. Somatic symptoms of female group were much more frequent than those of male group. The higher their grade is, the more somatic symptoms they complained. There were signiticant negative correlations between somatic symptoms and self-esteem in all groups. CONCLUSION: By the result of this study, we suggest that ASC can be used as a tool for evaluation of adolescent's somatic symptoms. We showed that the frequency of somatic symptoms in adolescents were higher in females than in males, and were higher in upper grade than in lower grade. We also showed that the more somatic symptoms they complained, the lower self-esteem they had.
