Original articleDevelopment of adolescent self-report measures from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health☆
Section snippets
Add health study design and instrumentation
The current research is based on data from Add Health, a 1-year longitudinal study of seventh- through 12th-grade students in the United States and the multiple social contexts in which they live. The primary sampling frame for the Add Health study included all high schools in the United States that had an 11th grade and at least 30 enrollees in the school (N = 26,666). Schools within this frame were stratified by geographic region, urbanicity, school size, school type, percentage white,
Reliability estimates
As illustrated in column 2 of Table 1, many of the multi-item scales demonstrated acceptable levels of internal consistency reliability among the scale validation sample (i.e., Cronbach α = .70–.87) (26). Three scales, Victimization History, Substance Use With Sex, and Contraceptive Use Self-Efficacy, had lower levels of internal consistency within the validation sample (.66, .65, and .65, respectively). With regard to Victimization History, low levels of problem-indicating response to one item
Discussion
This article provides adolescent health researchers with a set of measures and methodologic procedures used in early research on the Wave 1 core adolescent data set from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results suggest that many of the multi-item scales presented have acceptable levels of internal consistency within this nationally representative sample of young people. Measures demonstrating acceptable levels of reliability are appropriate for use with future research
Acknowledgements
This research is based on data from the Add Health project, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry (PI) and Peter Bearman, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with cooperative funding participation by the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication
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During the preparation of the manuscript, authors were supported in part by grants from the Maternal-Child Health Bureau, HRSA; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DHHS.