Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide insights into how young people who have been forced to migrate perceive school health education. Eighteen individuals aged 15–19 years (10 females, 8 males, average age 16.9 years) took part in either focus group interviews (n = 7) or individual interviews (n = 1). Participants were first presented with short scenarios concerning health education and were invited to use these scenarios as starting points to discuss their own experiences of health education. Participants were then presented with a collection of photographs that portrayed people displaying broad dimensions of health. Participants were asked to discuss the significance of the health dimensions in their lives, and describe how these dimensions were covered in school health education. Our findings suggest three broad perceptions of health education content: a moderately enthusiastic perception, a disengaged perception, and a marginalized perception. These findings: raise questions about whether the provision of health education matches the needs of young migrants, point to cultural differences in the way health topics are understood, and suggest that school health education might influence how migrants interact with health service providers.

RAS ID

78834

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

1-1-2025

Volume

40

Issue

3

Funding Information

Swedish Research Council (2020–03309)

PubMed ID

40249673

School

School of Education

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Publisher

Oxford Academic

Identifier

Valeria Varea: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3572-4976

Comments

Barker, D., Caldeborg, A., Quennerstedt, M., & Varea, V. (2025). How young migrants perceive school health education in Sweden. Health Education Research, 40(3), cyaf012. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyaf012

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1093/her/cyaf012