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.