From MCDONAS@co.thurston.wa.us Wed May 27 08:10:52 1998 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id IAA75728; Wed, 27 May 1998 08:10:51 -0700 Received: from co.thurston.wa.us (smtp.co.thurston.wa.us [198.239.36.66]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.09) with SMTP id IAA05717; Wed, 27 May 1998 08:10:50 -0700 Received: from Thurston-Message_Server by co.thurston.wa.us with Novell_GroupWise; Wed, 27 May 1998 08:12:33 -0800 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 4.1 Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 08:12:17 -0800 From: SHERRI MC DONALD To: PH-ASSESS@u.washington.edu, WSALPHO-L@u.washington.edu Subject: Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) Advisory Committee- Report Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline This is a long message, a report from local representatives appointed to the DOH advisory committee. The first meeting of the YRBS Advisory Committee was held May 26th. WSALPHO representatives on this committee include Torney Smith (Spokane Regional Health District), Kathryn Horsely (Seattle-King County Department of Public Health), and Sherri McDonald (Thurston County Public Health & Social Services). The committee is broadly representative of interested groups from across the state, including schools, PTA, research groups, funding groups, health education, and community supports (ie. churches), and OSPI. If you would like a list, please contact your representative or DOH staff. The DOH staff include Judy Schoder, Patrick Moran (survey liaison), Lillian Bensley and Juliet VanEenwyk, Maxine Hayes, Katryne Lukens-Bull, and Jeanette Stehr Green. The YRBS Advisory Committee is advisory to DOH for the development of a statewide adolescent health surveillence system, specifically for administration of the 1999 survey. The committee will give input on the survey process (e.g., school recruitment, community support), content of the survey instrument, and support the survey. We will meet quarterly through the spring of 1999. Our next meeting will be July 30th. The YRBS is an instrument developed by CDC to obtain information on health and safety behaviors and related risk and protective factors of youth. Questions include nutrition/eating, exercise, suicide, injuries/safety, tobacco, alcohol and other drug use. There will not be questions regarding sexual activity. Currently 40 other states use YRBS and our data will be comparable to other states and the national sample. The survey is scheduled to be administered in March/April 1999 to grades 9 - 12 students. The state sample will include at least 55 randomly selected schools. Local communities can choose to oversample, and to-date 11 counties have expressed interest in oversampling. DOH will provide a great deal of support for this effort. Early in April a copy of the YRBS was mailed to assessment coordinators, health officers and administrators of LHJs. A workgroup met on May 18th and came to agreement on a core of 60 questions. There can be about 40 questions added by local communities. If you want to suggest additional questions, the Questionnaire Workgroup wants to include only questions which have been field tested for reliability and validity for adolescents completing self-admiistered surveys. Preference will be given to questions that have been at least pilot tested with adolescents. Next steps: - feedback by June 26th to Juliet VanEenwyk on the questionnaire itself. - feedback re. composition of the advisory committee to Judy Schoder or Katryne Lukens-Bull (particularly about folks not supportive of YRBS in the past) - feedback or comments re. process to Judy Schoder, Katryne Lukins-Bull, Torney Smith, Kathryn Horsley, or Sherri McDonald. - work in your local communities to support YRBS and institutionalization of an adolescent health surveillence system. Think about how you could use information gathered via YRBS in your community, particularly how such information could support the educational mission of schools (e.g., children must be healthy and safe in order to learn, teachers must be safe in order to teach) .