Cultural capital and mental health in Iranian adolescents: a cross sectional study

It is believed that cultural capital is a non-financial asset and has strong association with social relationships and life styles. As such it is understood that cultural capital even has relationship with people’s health including mental health.
This was a population based study on a sample of adolescents living in Tehran, Iran. We measured cultural capital with a short questionnaire and mental health was assessed using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12). To explore the data, association between cultural capital and mental health was assessed.
In all 384 adolescents were entered into the study. The mean age of participants was 23.7 (SD = 3.23) years. The mean score for cultural capital score was 2.95 (SD = 0.54) out of 5 and it was 2.38 (SD = 0.50) out of 12 for mental health. The association between cultural capital and mental health was investigated using the logistic regression analysis. After controlling for demographic variables the results revealed that there was a significant association between cultural capital and mental health (OR = 0.92, (5% CI = 0.86-0.98; P = 0.02) indicating that increased cultural capital could decrease mental health problems.
The findings suggest that improving cultural capital could lead to improvement of mental health among adolescents.