Empowerment and quality of life of working adolescents supported by a brazilian NGO

Abstract

The scope of this work is to assess the empowerment of working adolescents and test its possible association with their quality of life. This was a transversal study held with 363 working adolescents that are assisted by a Charity Institution. Data was gathered by applying two questionnaires, one used to measure the quality of life (WHOQoL-Bref), the other were the questions on empowerment from the Integrated Questionnaire for the Measurement of Social Capital (SC-IQ) from the World Bank. The dependent variable (empowerment) was constructed by grouping participants, upon segmentation analysis. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to compare the scores of the WHOQoL-Bref domains (physical, psychological, social relations and environment) among the clusters, with 5% significance. With regard to the segmentation analysis, 126 (34.7%) adolescents were classified as having low empowerment, 161 (44.4%) formed the intermediary group and 70 (19.3%) had greater empowerment. The cluster with high empowerment had the highest quality of life score averages in all domains. The Kruskal-Wallis test revealed statistically significant difference between the clusters in the psychological (p=0,001), social relations (p=0,003) and global (p=0,024) domains. We conclude that the best quality of life scores were found in the group of adolescents with greater empowerment.