DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04372.v2
title: Health Behavior in School-Aged Children, 2001-2002 [United States]
title: Version 2

description: Since 1982, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe has sponsored a cross-national, school-based study of health-related attitudes and behaviors of young people. These studies, generally known as Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC), are based on independent national surveys of school-aged children in as many as 30 participating countries. The HBSC studies were conducted every four years since the 1985-1986 school year. The data available here are from the results of the United States survey conducted during the 2001-2002 school year. The study results can be used as stand-alone data, or to compare with the other countries involved in the international HBSC. The HBSC study has two main objectives. The first objective is to monitor health-risk behaviors and attitudes in youth over time to provide background data and to identify targets for health promotion initiatives. The second objective is to provide researchers with relevant information in order to understand and explain the development of health attitudes and behaviors through early adolescence. The study contains variables dealing with many types of drugs such as tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, inhalants, and any other substances. The study examines the first time these substances were used and the frequency of their use. Other topics include questions about the person's health and other health behaviors. Some of these topics include eating habits, body image, health problems, family make-up, personal injuries, bullying, fighting, and bringing weapons to school. A school administrator and the lead health education teacher also completed individual surveys concerning school programs and policies that affect students' health and the content of various health courses.
description: The data file contains weights. Each valid respondent record was weighted by the inverse of the probability of having selected the respondent's school and classroom, and adjusted for school nonresponse and student nonresponse within classrooms. The weights were then trimmed and adjusted to national totals by ethnicity and grade level. A hotdeck approach was used to impute missing values (for weighting purposes only) for race and ethnicity, classifying the students into five categories: White, African-American, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. Totals were obtained for each race and grade level from the National Center for Educational Statistics' Web site. The weights were then adjusted so that totals for each race/grade category corresponded to national totals. The name of the weight variable in the dataset is STU_WT.
description: Response Rates: Of the 548 schools selected, 204 schools did not respond. Extra schools were selected into the original sampling frame yielding a balance of 465 schools. From these 465 schools, 340 agreed to participate, yielding a participation rate of 73.2 percent. Within these schools, 18,620 students were eligible and 15,245 participated, yielding a student response rate of 81.9 percent. Of the 3,375 students who did not participate, 600 students did not return a consent form, 518 parents declined to allow their child to participate, and 1,620 students declined to participate. From the 340 schools that participated, a school administrator and lead health education teachers were asked to complete a survey. There were 329 questionnaires returned by a school administrator and 320 questionnaires returned by the lead health education teacher. A total of 317 schools returned both the administrator and teacher surveys.
description: This study employed a three-stage cluster design in which a school district (or a group of school districts) was the primary sampling unit (PSU) or first stage. The school was the second stage, and the classroom was the third stage.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: Health Behavior in School-Aged Children, 2001-2002 [United States]
description: The universe consisted of public, Catholic, and other private school students in grades 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 or their equivalent in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Very small schools, those with an enrollment of less than 14, were excluded from the universe. These schools comprise about 1 percent of the school enrollment in the United States.
description: on-site questionnaireData were collected and prepared for release by Macro International Inc., Calverton, Maryland.Of the 15,245 participants, 57 cases were missing for a significant number of key variables (specified in the international HBSC protocol) and were consequently dropped from the file. In addition, responding students in sampled classes were excluded if they were out of the sample target range for their grade, if their age was extreme for their grade (age outside of the 1-99th percentile for a grade, n = 365 students), or for whom either grade or age were unknown (n = 6 students), yielding a sample of 14,817 students in the United States in grades 6 through 10.The public-use file documentation, included in the codebook, references several files that are not included in this distribution.To protect the anonymity of respondents, all variables that could be used to identify individuals have been collapsed or recoded in the public use files. These modifications should not affect analytic uses of the public use files.