title: Subjective health complaints in adolescence--reliability and validity of survey methods.
abstract: This paper studies test-retest reliability and validity of one measure of adolescent health complaints. The test-retest included an eight-item symptom checklist developed for the survey of Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (n=344). Qualitative analysis showed adequate validity for most items. For the total sample, all items were found to have adequate intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) in the range 0.61-0.75. There were inter-item differences and girls generally received the higher values. Most changes were within one category. Adolescents' understanding of 16 complaints was studied by interviews with 38 adolescents. A few items showed ambiguity in interviews despite adequate test-retest stability.
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Health Promotion, University of Bergen, Norway. Siren.haugland@psych.uib.no
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Haugland
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wold
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D005260:Female; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008297:Male; D008603:Mental Health; D009664:Norway / Q000453:epidemiology; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results