OBJECTIVES: This study assesses 13-year changes in self-reported emotional and behavioral problems of Polish adolescents. Even though we already assessed time-related changes in emotional problems of Polish 16-year-olds, a comparison covering more age groups has been lacking.
METHODS: Youth Self Report (YSR) questionnaire was used to assess emotional and behavioral problems. We compared median scores and ran regression models to see whether age and gender influenced the observed changes. We ran a logistic regression analysis for deviant scores.
RESULTS: We found that median scores on most scales were higher after 13 years albeit the differences were quite small. We found that gender moderated the effect of age on scale scores. Score on the deviant range in attention problems and thought problems were 1.5 more frequent in the 2013 group.
CONCLUSIONS: We did not detect significant differences in self-reported emotional and behavioral problems of Polish adolescents between 2000 and 2013. We detected different coping strategies for boys and girls: boys reported more problems with delinquency and more externalizing behaviors whereas girls reported more problems on each scale.