Elements Influencing School Wellbeing in Upper Secondary Students with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities : A Quantitative Study

Adolescents with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDD) tend to face great challenges in school which can affect their school wellbeing. This paper investigates the relations between school wellbeing and NDD. The purpose of the study was to examine if NDD, class climate, bullying, mental health, and mental health problems predicted school wellbeing and if there were differences between upper secondary students with and without self-rated NDD. The data of this study was retrieved from wave four of the longitudinal multidisciplinary research programme LoRDIA. Study participants were 288 adolescents in year two of upper secondary school, where 61 had self-related NDD and 227 did not. First a Mann-Whitney U-test tested the differences between the groups. Then a multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the predictors’ influence on school wellbeing. Lastly, a correlation test was conducted to see if any predictor was masked by the difference in group size. The results showed that NDD, class climate and bullying are predictors to school wellbeing, where NDD is the strongest predictor. There was also a difference between the groups concerning psychiatric problems where the group with NDD reported more problems, although this still not being a predictor to school wellbeing for this group. In conclusion, class climate and bullying are predictors to school wellbeing for both students with and without self-related NDD which suggests that schools should work for a positive social climate in school. Secondly, the group of students with NDD experience lower levels of school wellbeing but this could not be explained by any of the variables used in this study which calls for further investigations as to what the causes are.