Björn Högberg

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Umeå University

Background A recent review of research on the association between school-related stress and internalizing problems found growing scholarly interest in the topic, but also raised questions concerning the quality and reliability of the existing knowledge base. The aim of this study was to investigate how robust the association between school-related...

Aims: This study examined the association between educational attainment and the risk of deaths of despair among individuals assessed for substance use severity at municipal social services in Sweden. It aimed to determine whether the protective association between education and despair-related mortality risk, commonly observed in broader populatio...

Bakground Growing educational disparities in mortality due to suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol-related liver disease – or “deaths of despair” (DoD) – have received increased attention in research and public debate. However, no study has investigated educational differences in despair-related mortality outside of North America. Thus, the aim this...

Background Low academic achievement and low educational attainment in adolescence is associated with higher risks of internalizing disorders later in life. However, less is known regarding if these associations vary over time across cohorts. The aim of this study was to investigate temporal changes in the association between academic achievement or...

Background Rising rates of internalizing disorders and rising rates of school failure among adolescents are growing concerns. Despite the strong association between academic achievement and internalizing disorders, possible links between these two trends have not been investigated. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the development of t...

Concerns related to school are consistently ranked as among the greatest stressors in the lives of adolescents. Research from varying contexts report rising rates of school‐related stress among students, but we currently lack knowledge on what drives these trends. The aim of this study is to investigate the predictors of temporal trends in school‐r...

This study examines the consequences of parental job displacement for birth outcomes and investigates how the effects vary with regional unemployment rates. We use Swedish register data and exploit plausibly exogenous variation caused by workplace closure to reduce the bias related to reverse causality and confounding. The differences in birth outc...

Academic stress among adolescents can undermine academic achievement and harm mental health. Levels of academic stress vary considerably across countries and education systems, but little is known regarding the causes of this variation. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework positing that stress will be lower in education systems that red...

Background This study investigated the possible mediating role of fear-of-failure between educational expectations and adolescent stress-related complaints with a specific focus on gender differences among Swedish adolescents, and related these findings more broadly to school-related demands and stress-related complaints. Methods A total of N = 55...

Increased levels of stress and other mental health problems have been reported amongst adolescents in high-income countries. In particular, rates of school-pressure have increased significantly. Despite such increases, little is known about the underlying determinants of increased adolescent stress, making this an emerging public health concern. Th...

Wellbeing has recently been given a more prominent place in education policy and discourse, with critics arguing that an overemphasis on achievement comes at the cost of well-being. This raises questions concerning possible trade-offs between the traditionally dominant focus on learning and achievement in education and the growing emphasis on well-...

Crossover effects of parental unemployment on subjective wellbeing of children attract growing attention in research on social inequalities. Recent economic crises call for identifying policies that mitigate the adverse effects of unemployment. Building on the theoretical insights from Capability Approach, we examine the relationship between parent...

Higher academic performance is almost universally considered a good thing, and most quantitative studies show that performance is positively, although weakly, related to mental health. Simultaneously, however, qualitative studies consistently find that high-performing students and students attending high-performing schools report high levels of str...

Parental unemployment can have detrimental effects on life chances of the children, and thereby reinforce inequalities across generations. Despite a substantial literature documenting that the health of infants at birth can have large and long-lasting consequences, research on intergenerational unemployment effects on infant health is scant. This s...

In response to declining results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, the then governing Swedish coalition in 2010–2014 introduced earlier grading, more national testing and a new standards-based curriculum. These reforms coincided with a greater emphasis on inclusive’ education understood in the ‘narrow’ sense of p...

Background and aims According to recent criticism, survey-based measures of adolescent psychosomatic complaints have poor content validity insofar as they conflate trivial with severe complaints. It is argued that this means that estimates of prevalence and trends in complaints may reflect trivial complaints that are not indicators of health proble...

In this study, we ask if high-stakes testing affects school-related stress among students and if there are gender differences in these effects. Students’ results on high-stakes tests can have long-term consequences for their future educational trajectories and life chances. For girls, who tend to have higher educational aspirations and tend to gain...

Students’ sense of belonging at school has declined across the world in recent decades, and more so in Sweden than in almost any other high-income country. However, we do not know the characteristics or causes of these worldwide trends. Using data on Swedish students aged 15–16 years from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) be...

Increasing mental health problems among adolescents have been have reported in several countries over the last decades. Yet, little is known regarding the societal changes underlying secular trends in adolescent mental health. The educational stressors hypothesis states that educational expansion and a shift to knowledge economies makes life chance...

The global diffusion of outcome-based accountability in education is contested, with accounts of universal convergence being challenged by perspectives emphasising heterogeneity across different national or local contexts. This study uses data from PISA to explore, firstly, the spatial and temporal diffusion of accountability across OECD countries,...

Increasing levels of psychosomatic symptoms, and other mental health problems, among adolescents, and especially among girls, have been reported across various countries. The “educational stressors hypothesis” states that this trend can be explained by an increasing amount of stressors in the school environment. This study tests this hypothesis, us...

Background: Previous research shows that parental unemployment is associated with low life satisfaction in adolescents. It is unclear whether this translates to an association between national unemployment and adolescent life satisfaction, and whether such a contextual association is entirely explained by parental unemployment, or if it changes as...

Education reforms that entail increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, assessment and grading have spread across education systems in recent decades. Critics have argued that these policies could have consequences for stress, identity, self-esteem and the overall health of pupils. However, these potentially negative consequences have rarely been...

Temporary work is common across Europe, especially among young people. Whether temporary employment is a transitory stage on the road to standard employment, and whether this varies depending on institutional contexts, is controversial. This article investigates variability in transition rates from temporary to permanent employment across Europe, a...

This article aims to investigate if education policies moderate the association between unemployment and well-being among young adults. Based on the capability approach, we argue that education policies mitigate the negative effects of unemployment by providing opportunities for education and thus ways to exit unemployment. Education policies can s...

Inequalities in health and well-being are important contemporary public health issues. This article is the first to investigate the institutional causes of inequality in well-being among youth in a comparative perspective. Data from the European Social Survey are used to analyse how educational policies moderate the association between social backg...

The aim of this study is to investigate cross-country variability in transition rates from unemployment to further education among young adults, as well as how barriers in educational systems affect these transition rates. Previous research on adult further education has largely neglected the role of policies, and has not taken unemployed people in...

Background: Suicide ideation is a health issue affecting adolescents worldwide. There are significant variations in suicide ideation between countries and genders, which have not been fully explained. Research is especially lacking in countries outside Europe and North America. Gender equality has been shown to matter in other aspects of adolescent...

Research shows that the school environment is an important social determinant of health among children and adolescents. However, we know virtually nothing of the health consequences of national education systems and policies, for example the stratification of pupils by academic ability. This study aimed to investigate if education system stratifica...

Labor market insecurities have been growing in Europe and previous research has illustrated that unemployment and insecure jobs negatively affect individuals’ well-being and health. Although empirical evidence suggests that these effects vary substantially across different welfare states, we still know little about the moderating role of specific l...

EXCEPT Working Papers are peer-reviewed outputs from the http://www.except-project.eu/ project. The series is edited by the project coordinator Dr. Marge Unt and by the project co-coordinator Prof. Michael Gebel. These working papers are intended to meet the European Commission's expected impact from the project: i. to advance the knowledge base th...

The study investigated how social policies moderate the association between gender and health among older people across European countries. The study is the first to take a comprehensive view on the role of social policies in connection with gender inequality in health among older Europeans. The association between gender and poor self-rated health...

Comparative studies of health inequalities have largely neglected age and ageing aspects, while ageing research has often paid little attention to questions of social inequalities. This article investigates cross-country differences in gradients in self-rated health and limiting long-standing illness (LLSI) in middle-aged and in older people (aged...