A review of Society for Adolescent Medicine abstracts and Journal of Adolescent Health Care articles.
Adolescent medicine research has dramatically increased over the past 20 years. The object of this study was to assess the status of design in adolescent health care research. All abstracts of presentations at the 1978-1985 Society for Adolescent Medicine (SAM) Meetings are included as well as all articles from the Journal of Adolescent Health Care (JAHC) from 1980 through September of 1985. The abstracts were analyzed for basic design, subject, sample size, study site, number of authors, and type of statistical analysis. A descriptive design comprised 32.8% of the SAM abstracts and 62.9% of the JAHC articles. An observational design comprised 57.8% of the SAM abstracts and 35.5% of the JAHC articles. An experimental design comprised 9.3% of the SAM abstracts and 1.6% of the JAHC articles. Of the 203 abstracts, 46% involved medical and 45.6% psychosocial topics. The JAHC articles were also fairly equally divided. Descriptive studies have decreased from 1978 to 1985 whereas observational studies have increased. The medium sample size of SAM abstracts increased from 1978 (83) to 1985 (100). Statistical methods were only analyzed for JAHC articles. Sixty-one percent used either no methods or used descriptive statistics only. The major statistical tests used were contingency tables, t-tests, analyses of variance, and Pearson correlations. Adolescent medicine research from these two sources usually involves descriptive and observational designs. The few clinical trials conducted involved small sample sizes. An increase in experimental and collaborative projects is needed.
D000293:Adolescent; D000295:Adolescent Medicine; D006801:Humans; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D012107:Research Design; D012955:Societies, Medical; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014481:United States