The health of youth: a cross-national surveY

Abstract: This report presents the preliminary findings from WHO’s fourth Health behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. It provides a wealth of information about the health and lifestyles of over 100,000 children living in 24 countries who participated in the survey conducted during the 1993/94 school year. Research teams undertook the survey in each of the participating countries who were instructed to follow a rigorous study protocol. Any survey carried out by more than one research team will have problems ensuring consistency in data collection. In this survey, as outlined in Chapter 1, such problems are further compounded by the questionnaire being administered in a variety of educational systems, languages and cultures. Given such reservations about the likely comparability of data from different countries, cross-country comparisons of the prevalence of individual health behaviours based on the HBSC survey should be treated with caution. On the other hand, the data presented in this report do reveal considerable variations and common patterns in the prevalence of individual health behaviours among young people from different countries. It has been argued elsewhere that such large differences are unlikely to be fully accounted for by the above methodological problems, and may therefore reflect reality. Strong similarities in the interrelationships between variables in different countries are good evidence that there is validity in comparing the data from these different countries. 

HBSC data: 1993/94 international file

Collection: WHO report

Copyright: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Editors: Alan King, Bente Wold, Chris Tudor-Smith and Yossi Harel

Suggested citation: King A, Wold B, Tudor-Smith C & Harel Y. (1996). The Health of Youth: A cross-national survey. WHO Regional Publications, European Series No. 69.