Subjective health complaints in adolescence––Reliability and validity of survey methods, Pages 611-624

This paper studies test–retest reliability and validity of one measure of adolescent health complaints. The test–retest included an eight-item symptom checklist developed for the survey of Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (n=344). Qualitative analysis showed adequate validity for most items. For the total sample, all items were found to have adequate intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) in the range 0·61–0·75. There were inter-item differences and girls generally received the higher values. Most changes were within one category. Adolescentsʹ understanding of 16 complaints was studied by interviews with 38 adolescents. A few items showed ambiguity in interviews despite adequate test–retest stability.