dc.description.abstract | Background: Leisure time activities and culture participation may have health effects and be important in pulic
health promotion. More knowledge on how cultural activity participation may influence self-perceived health,
life-satisfaction, self-esteem and mental health is needed.
Methods: This article use data from the general population-based Norwegian HUNT Study, using the cross-sectional
Young-HUNT3 (2006–08) Survey including 8200 adolescents. Data on cultural activity participation, self-perceived health,
life-satisfaction, self-esteem, anxiety and depression were collected by self-reported questionnaires.
Results: Both attending meetings or training in an organisation or club, and attending sports events were positively
associated with each of the health parameters good self-percieved health, good life-satisfaction, good self-esteem,
and low anxiety and depression symptoms. We found differences according to gender and age (13–15 years versus
16–19 years old) for several culture activities, where girls aged 16–19 years seemed to benefit most from being
culturally active. The extent of participation seemed to matter. Those who had frequent participation in cultural
activities reported better health outcomes compared to inactive adolecents.
Conclusions: The results from this study indicate that participation in cultural activities may be positively associated
with health, life-satisfaction and self-esteem in adolescents and thus important in public health promotion. Possible sex
and age differences should be taken into account.
Keywords: Culture activity, Adolescents, Mental health, Self-perceived health, Self-esteem, Life-satisfaction, Anxiety and
depression | nb_NO |
dc.description.localcode | © 2015 Hansen et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. | nb_NO |