Subjective health complaints in adolescence - Reliability and validity of survey methods

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. (C) 2001 The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents.