Comparison of General Health in Adolescent Boys and Girls and its Relationship with Personality Characteristics

The importance of the mental processes and their role in people’s health and disease have been demonstrated by several studies. Although diverse factors affect people’s health, for the realization of their general health, and the role of personality factors that determine the individuals’ rules of conduct, further studies are required. Exploration and comparison of general health in adolescent girls and boys and its relationship with personality characteristics. We selected for this cross-sectional study, 4342 male and female students in high schools and pre-university across 11 provinces of Iran through multistage cluster sampling. General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and Five-factor Personality Traits (NEO) were filled. In order to analyze the data, descriptive statistics parameters such as frequency, mean and standard deviation and for inferential analysis, Correlation Coefficient, Regression Analysis and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) were used. According to the results, there was a significant difference between adolescent girls and boys in terms of general health. The results also showed that there was a significant positive correlation between neuroticism and general health and a significant negative correlation between extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness and general health (p<0/01). Also it was shown that neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience can be considered respectively as the predictors for measuring the probability of adolescents’ general health status. Considering the results, it seems that by examining the personality characteristics of adolescents we can measure the likelihood of changes in various aspects of their general health conditions. Also, as the results demonstrated, we can conclude that the general health of the girls are more at risk than the boys.