Research PaperEmotional difficulties and self-harm among British adolescents with and without disabilities: Cross sectional study
Section snippets
Method
Secondary analysis of data from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), data which are available through the UK Data Service (http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/). Full details of the design of MCS are available in a series of reports and technical papers,28 key aspects of which are summarised below.
Prevalence of disability
Our procedure led to the identification of 972 adolescents with disability (9.9% of the analytic sample, 95% CI 9.0%–10.8%); 603 (6.1%, 95%CI 5.5%–6.8%) who were reported to experience ‘a little’ limitation in carrying out day-to-day activities and 369 (3.8%, 95%CI 3.2%–4.4%) who were reported to experience ‘a lot’ of limitation in carrying out day-to-day activities. We will refer to these two groups as participants with ‘mild limitations’ and ‘moderate/severe limitations’. Prevalence rates for
Discussion
The results of our study indicate that: (1) in the majority of analyses adolescents with disability reported significantly higher rates of emotional difficulties and self-harm than their non-disabled peers; (2) the strength of the association between disability and emotional difficulties and self-harm was greater for maternal report of adolescent emotional difficulties among disabled adolescents with moderate/severe activity limitations, and among adolescents with psychosocial impairments; (3)
Funding
This research was supported by grant APP1116385 from Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests of conflicts of interest to declare.
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