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The income gradient and child mental health in Australia: does it vary by assessors?

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Abstract

In this paper, we examine the income gradient in child mental health using longitudinal data from a large, national cohort of Australian children. We contribute to the body of existing literature by: (i) investigating whether and to what extent a child’s mental health levels and their relationship to income vary when a child’s mental health is assessed by the child’s parent, the child’s teacher and the child her/himself; (ii) exploring whether the reporting differences in a child’s mental health is associated systematically with household income; and (iii) examining the child mental health gradient and the evolution of this gradient by the child’s age. We found that a child’s mental health and the income gradient vary depending on who assesses the child’s mental health (the gradient was the largest when assessed by parents and the smallest when assessed by the child). Furthermore, the magnitude of the effect of mental health and income gradient faded when we controlled for some important variables, such as maternal health.

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Notes

  1. We thank a reviewer of this journal for this suggestion.

  2. The weekly income data was collected from responses to the following question “Before income tax is taken out, how much does … usually receive from all sources in total?” Unfortunately, LSAC lacks sufficient information on the income of other household members, so we were unable to use household income similar to Johnston et al. [26] and instead we used parental income.

  3. Parental reports come from the child’s main carer, or Parent 1 in LSAC (i.e. the parent who knows the child best). In these data, in over 95 % of the cases this is the child’s biological mother. For simplicity, in the remainder of the paper we refer to Parent 1 as the mother.

  4. However, we provide the results of fixed-effects estimator in the Appendix for interested readers.

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Acknowledgements

We greatly acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Francisco (Paco) Perales (Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland) on the initial draft of the paper. We also grateful to two anonymous referees of this journal and the participants of the 14th International Conference of Western Economic Association International for their feedback. This paper uses unit record data from Growing Up in Australia, the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. The study is conducted in partnership between the Department of Social Services (DSS), the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Appropriate ethical approval was gained during the study. The findings and views reported in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the DSS, the AIFS, or the ABS.

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No financial support/fund is received to conduct this research. This is conducted as part of our regular service.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Commerce, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, 4350, QLD, Australia

    Rasheda Khanam

  2. Centre for Applied Health Economics, School of Medicine, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Son Nghiem

  3. Faculty of Medicine, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Maisha Rahman

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  1. Rasheda Khanam
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  2. Son Nghiem
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Correspondence to Rasheda Khanam.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4, Full estimates from models of child mental health with extended covariates. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and Fig. 4.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics
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Table 5 OLS
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Table 6 Random-effects
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Table 7 Fixed effects
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Table 8 F tests (p value) for differences in SDQ scores by raters
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Table 9 SDQ: the SDQ scores are produced from responses to the following questions about child’s behaviour over the past 6 months
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Fig. 4
figure 4

Distribution of SDQ scores and log of income

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Khanam, R., Nghiem, S. & Rahman, M. The income gradient and child mental health in Australia: does it vary by assessors?. Eur J Health Econ 21, 19–36 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-019-01106-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-019-01106-6

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