Truth or Consequences: The Intertemporal Consistency of Adolescent Self-Report on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey

The author analyzed the consistency of adolescent respondents' self-reported health risk behaviors, noting that while surveys are "the primary information source" about such behaviors, adolescents may not report them accurately. Inaccurate data can undermine the formulation of adolescent health policy, as well as its evaluation, according to the study.

Using test-retest data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the author compared participants' responses to 72 questions regarding risk behaviors at a two-week interval. Individual YRBS questions were evaluated for prevalence of change and three measures of unreliability: "inconsistency (retraction and apparent initiation), agreement measured as tetrachoric correlation, and estimated error due to inconsistency assessed with a Bayesian method."

Adolescents reported their sex, drug, alcohol, and tobacco use more consistently than other risk behaviors in a two-week period, "opposite their tendency over longer intervals," Rosenbaum found. Compared with other YRBS topics, "most sex, alcohol, and tobacco items had stable prevalence estimates, higher average agreement, and lower estimated measurement error," concluded Rosenbaum. Inconsistency with respect to adolescent reports about weight control behaviors is "particularly problematic because of the increased investment in adolescent obesity research and reliance on annual surveys for surveillance and policy evaluation."

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