Table of Contents | Previous | Next |
INTERNALIZING/EXTERNALIZING BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS
NATIONAL LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF ADOLESCENT HEALTH
Measure: Feelings Scale
Background
The Feelings Scale is found within the Adolescent In-Home Questionnaire of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Items used to assess internalizing, specifically depression, are comparable to those used in the Center for Epidemiological Studies – Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977).
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 administrator. 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 over-sampled 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.
Section 10 of the Adolescent In-Home Questionnaire, the Feelings Scale, was administered to all respondents to collect information about their current emotional state.
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 only of 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 Feelings Scale was reported by the adolescent. In-home adolescent questionnaires were
administered by a computer-assisted personal interview. The Feelings Scale takes about 4 to 6
minutes to administer.
Psychometrics/Data Quality
This information is not readily available.
Languages Available
Information regarding availability in non-English materials is not readily available.
Items Included
Response categories for the full set of questions are as follows:
- You were bothered by things that usually don’t bother you.
0 never or rarely
1 sometimes
2 a lot of the time
3 most of the time or all of the time - You didn’t feel like eating, your appetite was poor
- You felt that you could not shake off the blues, even with help from your family and your friends.
- You felt that you were just as good as other people.
- You had trouble keeping your mind on what you were doing.
- You felt depressed.
- You felt that you were too tired to do things.
- You felt hopeful about the future.
- You thought your life had been a failure.
- You felt fearful.
- You were happy
- You talked less than usual.
- You felt lonely.
- People were unfriendly to you.
- You enjoyed life.
- You felt sad.
- You felt that people disliked you.
- It was hard to get started doing things
- You felt life was not worth living.
References and Source Documents
Radloff, L. S. (1977). The CES-D scale: A self-report depression scale for research in the general population. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 385-401.
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/
| Table of Contents | Previous | Next |