Youth health-risk behavior assessment in Fiji: the reliability of Global School-based Student Health Survey content adapted for ethnic Fijian girls.
OBJECTIVE
The Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSHS) is an assessment for adolescent health-risk behaviors and exposures, supported by the World Health Organization. Although already widely implemented - and intended for youth assessment across diverse ethnic and national contexts - no reliability data have yet been reported for GSHS-based assessment in any ethnicity or country-specific population. This study reports test-retest reliability for GSHS content adapted for a female adolescent ethnic Fijian study sample in Fiji.


METHODS
We adapted and translated GSHS content to assess health-risk behaviors as part of a larger study investigating the impact of social transition on ethnic Fijian secondary schoolgirls in Fiji. In order to evaluate the performance of this measure for our ethnic Fijian study sample (n=523), we examined its test-retest reliability with kappa coefficients, % agreement, and prevalence estimates in a sub-sample (n=81). Reliability among strata defined by topic, age, and language was also examined.


RESULTS
Average agreement between test and retest was 77%, and average Cohen's kappa was 0.47. Mean kappas for questions from core modules about alcohol use, tobacco use, and sexual behavior were substantial, and higher than those for modules relating to other risk behaviors.


CONCLUSIONS
Although test-retest reliability of responses within this country-specific version of GSHS content was substantial in several topical domains for this ethnic Fijian sample, only fair reliability for the module assessing dietary behaviors and other individual items suggests that population-specific psychometric evaluation is essential to interpreting language and country-specific GSHS data.
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, 641 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA. anne_becker@hms.harvard.edu
Anne E
AE
Becker
Andrea L
AL
Roberts
Alexandra
A
Perloe
Asenaca
A
Bainivualiku
Lauren K
LK
Richards
Stephen E
SE
Gilman
Ruth H
RH
Striegel-Moore
D000293:Adolescent; D005260:Female; D005367:Fiji / Q000208:ethnology; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012309:Risk-Taking; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D055815:Young Adult