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The purpose of the Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey (MIYHS) is to assess the health status of Maine’s youth, as well as the positive and negative attitudes and behaviors that influence healthy development. Topics include: substance use, bullying and violence, unintentional injuries, sexual behavior, health status (including oral health) and disabilities, physical activity, weight control and nutrition, suicide/depression, and developmental assets. The MIYHS represents the collaborative effort of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Office of Substance Abuse in the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education. It replaces the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), the Maine Youth Drug and Alcohol Use Survey (MYDAUS), the Youth Tobacco Survey (YTS) and the Maine Child’s Health Survey, and incorporates questions from Search Institute’s Assets survey. Data from the MIYHS can be used to plan and evaluate prevention programs and to provide the basis for grant applications.
The MIYHS is funded by the Maine CDC with Tobacco Settlement funds and Maternal and Child Health state match funds, by the Office of Substance Abuse with Federal Substance Abuse Block Grant funds, and by the US CDC through a grant administered by the Maine Department of Education.
The MIYHS consists of four age groups, each with its own survey type:
The first MIYHS was administered in February 2009, and will continue to be offered on odd-numbered years.
There is no evidence that simply asking students about health risk behaviors will encourage them to try that behavior.
No, except for the K/3 version, the survey is anonymous, and therefore students cannot be tracked over time. For the K/3 survey, identifiers help us match data from measured heights, weights and the oral health screen with parent responses, however, all identifiers are destroyed after the data is matched.
Public schools with students in any of the grades listed above are eligible to participate in the MIYHS, as well as non-sectarian private schools with 60% or more publicly-funded students.
Most of the questions on the MIYHS have been taken from other national surveys. Some questions are from the National YRBS and have had “test – re-test” studies showing that students answer these questions consistently when they take the survey a second time in a 6 week period. Many questions are taken from SAMHSA’s “Communities That Care survey, and these were validated, using correlations between groups of behaviors. Several other sources of questions were also used. Any questions for which there was not sufficient documentation (because, for example, the question was for an emerging issue and no comparable survey questions were found in the literature) are now undergoing further testing for validity.
The MIYHS protocol and reporting conventions are designed to protect student confidentiality, so there is no advantage to the student in giving false information. For instance, on the day of the survey, monitors are asked to remain at the front of the room, and completed surveys are placed in envelopes that are then sealed. The MIYHS does not ask for the student's name or birthday. Data are not released on schools or individual grades when fewer than 20 students in that school or grade participated in the survey, or when the data in any one cell represents fewer than 6 students.
Research indicates data of this nature may be gathered as credibly from adolescents as from adults. Previous studies testing the consistency of responses to in-school surveys similar to MIYHS have demonstrated that students reliably answer questions in the same way over a 6 week period. Because it would be difficult to remember previous untruthful answers, these test-retest studies support the premise that most students do answer truthfully. In addition, each individual survey is checked for conflicting answers, such as a student answering one question about smoking positively and another question negatively. Such answers are thrown out of the data set, and if an individual survey shows a large number of such inconsistencies, that survey is completely thrown out.
Schools and school districts that participated in the MIYHS have access to their web-based reports if the report is based on information from 20 or more students. County, public health district and state reports are available for comparison. The data from these reports can be used for planning and evaluating youth health programs, and can be used in grant applications. We recommend that once "trouble spots" are identified, schools focus their resources in these areas using science-based prevention programs.
Yes, although we don’t recommend making comparisons to previous years’ MYDAUS or YRBS results due to methodological differences.. The 30-day use questions were taken from the YRBS (differences from the MYDAUS shown below). The youngest option for “age first used” is “<= 8” rather than “<=10”; this would lower the average age at first use if a sufficient number of students started using at <=8 or 9. Also, not all of these questions were on the 5th/6th grade survey, which was offered to a random sample of schools. If the 6th grade results had been combined with other grades in previous applications, the results from the MIYHS won’t be comparable.
| Alcohol | Cigarettes | Marijuana | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30-Day Use | a | b | c |
| Average Age of Onset | d | de | d |
| Perceived Harm | OK | OK | OK |
| Perceived Parental Disapproval | OK | OK | OK |
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