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PARENTAL MONITORING/AWARENESS
NATIONAL LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF ADOLESCENT HEALTH
Measure: Item-level measures of parental awareness
Background
The items that could be used to assess parental monitoring or awareness in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) are found within both the In-Home Parent Questionnaire and the Adolescent In-Home Questionnaire. Because the current document makes a differentiation between “monitoring” (i.e., active pursuit of child information) and “awareness” (i.e., what parents know, devoid of details of how the information was obtained), the items included in Add Health are considered awareness. If parent or child items (or the conjunction of the two) can illustrate that the parent actively pursued the information, they may be considered monitoring, as defined for these purposes.
Because documentation on creating these items (and, therefore, their exact intent) was not readily available, the list of included items generally measure parental awareness or knowledge more broadly.
The primary funding of Add Health was from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Seventeen other federal agencies also provided some funding. Quality Education Data, Inc., provided the database used to generate the random sample of U.S. schools. The National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago fielded Waves I and II of the study, while the Research Triangle Institute conducted the fieldwork for Wave III.
Population Assessed
Add Health is a nonexperimental, nationally representative, longitudinal study of students in grades 7 through 12 in the United States in the 1994–1995 school year. Data were collected from the youth, their parents, siblings, friends, romantic partners, fellow students, and school administrators through multiple data collection components, including an adolescent in-school survey, adolescent in-home interview, parent in-home interview, and school administrator survey. All instruments were fielded in Wave I. Wave II included an adolescent in-home interview as well as telephone updates from the school administrators. Wave III consisted of only a respondent in-home interview. Available data also include picture vocabulary test scores, an in-school friendship network dataset, and information on the geographic location of households within the communities.
In addition to the core sample, the study also oversampled students from several special subgroups, including disabled youth, Chinese, Cuban, and Puerto Rican adolescents, as well as Black youth from high socioeconomic status families. Families were considered to be of high socioeconomic status if at least one parent held a college degree. In addition, the study oversampled adolescents living together within one household. This group is referred to as the “genetic sample” and includes oversamples of twins, half- and step-siblings, and non-related pairs. Some of the adolescents selected from this oversampled group did not attend one of the original 80 high schools or 52 middle schools, but were recruited because they resided with an adolescent that did attend one of those 132 schools.
The parent awareness items in both the In-Home Parent Questionnaire and Adolescent In-Home Questionnaire explore the level of parental awareness from both the adolescent and parent perspective.
Periodicity
All instruments were fielded in Wave I between September 1994 and December 1995. Wave II, fielded approximately 1 year later (during 1996), included an adolescent in-home interview as well as telephone updates from the school administrator. Wave III consisted of only a respondent in-home interview. It was fielded approximately 6 years after Wave II, during 2001–2002.
Subscales/Components
This information is not readily available.
Procedures for Administration
The parent awareness items were reported by both the parent and the adolescent. In-home adolescent questionnaires were administered by computer-assisted personal interviews, as well as computer-assisted self-interviews for more sensitive questions. Parent questionnaires were administered by an interviewer on a paper-and-pencil instrument, which was later scanned.
Psychometrics/Data Quality
This information is not readily available.
Languages Available
Information regarding availability in non-English materials is not readily available.
Items Included
The following items are from the Add Health questionnaires.
Items From the Parent In-Home Questionnaire
C10. The next questions are about [NAME]’s best [male/ female] friend. Do you know what school this friend goes to?
No
Yes
(He/she) doesn’t go to school.
C11. Have you met this friend in person?
No
Yes
C12. Have you met this friend’s parents?
No
Yes
C13. What kind of influence is [NAME]’s best friend—good, bad, or neither?
A good influence
A bad influence
Neither a good nor a bad influence
C14. Does [NAME] have one, special [girlfriend/boyfriend]?
No
Yes
Don’t know
C15. Have you met [him/her] in person?
No
Yes
C16. Have you met [his/her] parents?
No
Yes
C17. Please think about all of [NAME]’s friends. How many parents of [NAME]’s friends have you talked to in the last four weeks?
0
1
2
3
4
5
6 or more
C35. In the past week, have you and [NAME] talked about [his/her] school work or grades?
No
Yes
C26. In the past week, have you and [NAME] talked about other things [he/she] is doing at school?
No
Yes
C27. Have you talked with any of [NAME]’s teachers about [his/her] school work this school year, either informally or in a regularly scheduled parent-teacher conference?
No
Yes
C43A. How much have you and [NAME] talked about [his/her] having sexual intercourse and the negative or bad things that would happen if [he got someone/she got] pregnant?
Not at all
Somewhat
A moderate amount
A great deal
B. the dangers of getting a sexually transmitted disease?
C. the negative or bad impact on [his/her] social life because [he/she] would lose the respect of others?
D. the moral issues of not having sexual intercourse? C43B. How much have you talked to [NAME]: A. about birth control?
Not at all
Somewhat
A moderate amount
A great deal
B. about sex?
C45. The next questions are about [NAME]’s social life. Do you think that [he/she] has ever gone out on a date?
No
Yes
C46. Do you think that [he/she] has ever kissed and necked?
C47. Do you think that [he/she] has ever had sexual intercourse?
Items From the Adolescent In-Home Questionnaire, Sections 12 (Nonresident biological mother) and 13 (Non-resident biological father)
12. Which of the following things have you done with your biological mother [or biological father] in the past four weeks?
Have you talked about someone you’re dating, or a party you went to?
No
Yes
Have you had a talk about a personal problem you were having?
Have you talked about your school work or grades?
Have you worked on a project for school?
Have you talked about other things you’re doing in school?
References and Source Documents
Carolina Population Center (2000). Research Design: Facts at a Glance. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina Population Center (2002). Add Health Funding, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina Population Center (2002). Research Design: The Study, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina Population Center (2003). Add Health Research Design, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina Population Center (2003). Design Focus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Carolina Population Center (1998). National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: In School Questionnaire Code Book. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina Population Center (1999). National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: Parental Questionnaire Code Book. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina Population Center (1998). National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: Adolescent In-Home Questionnaire Code Book. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/
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