Paper Title
Beyond Validity and Reliability: Meaning-in-Context of Adolescents’ Self-Reports of Sexual Behavior
Keywords
- adolescent sexual behavior
- self-report accuracy
- sexual health research
- condom use reporting
- survey reliability
- survey validity
- meaning-in-context
- sexual behavior measurement
- hiv risk assessment
- sti prevention
- test-retest reliability
- acasi data collection
- adolescent health surveys
- public health research
- sexual behavior reporting
- data collection methods
- research methodology
- health communication
- behavioral research
- self-report limitations
- adolescent risk behavior
- youth sexuality studies
- measurement challenges
- sexual health education
- data validity
- acasi
Article Type
Research Article
Journal
Research Impact Tools
Publication Info
Volume: 44 | Issue: 3 | Pages: 199–200
Published On
March, 2009
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Abstract
Some years ago, my colleagues and I were pilot-testing a self-administered survey item about condom use at most recent intercourse. The item read “Was a condom used the last time you had vaginal sex?” The wording was closely adapted from widely used measures of condom use. Pilot testing went well until a research assistant showed me a form with “No” marked as the response. In reply to my query about why this was a problem, the research assistant pointed to the short sentence written beneath the item. It said “The condom was new.” I write, read, use, and critique a lot of research questions related to adolescents’ sexual behavior, and I often think of this experience while doing so. That young adolescent's response to our research inquiry expresses what I've come to consider my penultimate principle in the measurement of adolescents’ sexual behavior: this is as good as it gets. “As good as it gets” summarizes recognition and acceptance of an irresolvable gap between an unknowable truth and a knowable datum. The unknowable truth is whether some idealized type of sexual behavior physically occurred. I say “idealized” because we attempt to measure sex as specific individual behaviors when it is in fact an integrated and highly coordinated set of gestures, activities and feelings that only roughly correspond to our categories. The knowable datum is an adolescent's report on the occurrence of that sexual behavior, if it can be extracted from those complex gestures, activities and feelings and matched to some key bit or phrase in the investigator's question. The gap between truth and datum haunts investigators and delights skeptics of the veracity of self-reports of sexual behavior. One approach to addressing this issue is to assess test–retest reliability of adolescents’ self-reports. This is the approach taken by Vanable et al. in this issue [1]. The article adds to an existing literature that notes, in general, that measures of adolescents’ self-reported sexual behaviors have imperfect but satisfactory reliability [2,3]. Moreover, the paper extends the existing literature by the provision of reliability data on several other measures relevant to understanding of human immunodeficiency virus/sexually transmitted infection risk and protection behaviors, as well as understanding of the reliability of all of these measures within the context of an audio computer–assisted interview (ACASI) data collection format.
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