Self reported well-being among adolescents in Swedish stepfamilies

Jani Turunen, Stockholm University

This paper studies child well-being in Swedish stepfamilies. It focuses on adolescents' experience of psycho-somatic problems like frequent head- and stomach aches and sleeping disorders as well as consentration problems in school. Children in stepfamiles are compared with children in both biological two-parent families and single parent households. I take in to count whether the presence of stepsiblings and half siblings affects the likelihood of experiencing psycho-somatic problems as well as the child's age, gender and parental educational background among other things. The paper is based on pooled cross-sectional survey data from the Swedish Child-LNU survey from 2000 and the Child-ULF surveys from 2001, 2002 and 2003. These are self reported data from children aged 10-18 years. The method used is logistic regression analysis.