Truth or consequences: the intertemporal consistency of adolescent self-report on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

ABSTRACT: Surveys are the primary information source about adolescents' health risk behaviors, but adolescents may not report their behaviors accurately. Survey data are used for formulating adolescent health policy, and inaccurate data can cause mistakes in policy creation and evaluation. The author used test-retest data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (United States, 2000) to compare adolescents' responses to 72 questions about their risk behaviors at a 2-week interval. Each question was evaluated for prevalence change and 3 measures of unreliability: inconsistency (retraction and apparent initiation), agreement measured as tetrachoric correlation, and estimated error due to inconsistency assessed with a Bayesian method. Results showed that adolescents report their sex, drug, alcohol, and toba

SUBMITTER: Rosenbaum JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2727247 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature