Cross-national

I know it may be a little difficult for most of us, but try to think back when you were a teenager. If you could use one word to describe who you were, what would that one word be? Okay, I’ll go first……Explorer!

What makes US teens different from UK teens different from Netherland teens, different from Japanese teens and so on? When I teens, I am talking about adolescent female and males between ages 15-18 years of age. The Youth Behavior Risk Survey (YRBS) which should sound familiar to all of us from Remler’s class is a Center for Disease Control (CDC) national school-based confidential survey administered to public high schools only.

So what do other parts of the world use to survey their youth? Turns out many other countries such Wales, Scotland and England are collecting cross-national data and have adapted the CDC’s YRBS questions as a tool to measure the behavior of the teens in their country. When we look around we see teenagers in our communities and in our lives that pretty much look the same. Their clothing, hair styles, music, how they are marketed by various advertisers are all pretty similar. Despite their different racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, economic and social backgrounds it is interesting to evaluate the outcomes of these self reported random sampled surveys. To find out more about the YRBS and to seek some of the results see: http://www.cdc.gov/YRBS/ - 26k - Cached .

By the way, researchers across the board take into consideration, especially when it comes to the sex and obesity questions on the YRBS that boys overestimate the number of times they had sex and how much they weigh, and girls underestimate the number of times they had sex and how much they weigh. Just like adults!

D Lomax