CDC and YRBS: Time for Transparency

This post is related to the Youth Suicide Rise project

CDC response to Washington Post questions related to my criticism of CDC misrepresentation of YRBS results was incomplete and misleading. Furthermore, CDC demonstrated abject inability to admit any mistakes.

Inability to admit error and lack of transparency will damage the integrity of both the CDC and its indispensable high school survey YRBS.

 

CDC YRBS: Bias in Censoring Questionnaires

This post is related to the Youth Suicide Rise project

Evidence indicates that girls whose 2019 YRBS questionnaire did not include the rape question were younger and less likely to be sexually active as well as to ever have had sex -- precisely the factors associated with higher risks of sexual violence victimization. The removal of such a group of girls from the random sample can produce substantial error in results, especially for questions related to sex.

 

CDC Misinformation on Girls and Violence: Why it Matters

This post is related to the Youth Suicide Rise project

Before I posted my critique of the recent misinformation by CDC about girls being engulfed by a growing wave of violence, I revised it several times in order to remove any trace of indignation over the conduct of CDC officials. I also restricted my focus to statistical matters.

I will now briefly share some of my concerns about the implications of the CDC misinformation issue.

 

CDC Misinformation on Girls and Violence

This post is related to the Youth Suicide Rise project

CDC announced that 'dramatic increases' in exposure to violence led to teenage girls being 'engulfed in a growing wave' of violence. The CDC failed to provide compelling evidence for this extraordinary assertion and omitted data that contradicts it.

Preview of 2021 YRBS Results

 

Preview of 2021 YRBS Results

The CDC released Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011-2021 that contains crucial information about many of the 2021 YRBS results before the official release of such data (this will come a few months later).

Myths of the Pandemic and Adolescent Mental Health

 

Myths about the Pandemic and Adolescent Mental Health

A Comment on The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize (The Washington Post)

The Washington Post recently published a report titled The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize (Donna St. George & Valerie Strauss) about the numerous difficulties facing schools in their attempts to deal with various mental health issues of its students.

Unfortunately this otherwise praiseworthy article may be considerably misleading at times, especially due to omission, misdirection and ambiguity, in its handling of statistical data and scientific evidence regarding the effects of the pandemic in general and school closings in particular on the mental health of adolescents.

 

The Fleeting Persistence of Hopelessness

(A Comment on Why American Teens Are So Sad)

A recent essay in The Atlantic titled Why American Teens Are So Sad starts with alarming news:

The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study.

The notion that nearly half of U.S. teens have been in a state of constant desperation lately is reinforced by a graph labeled Percent of High-School Students Feeling Persistently Sad or Hopeless that displays the rate climbing up to 44.2% in 2021:

Note: The Atlantic mislabeled 2009 as 2004 and at least two data points are incorrect (Overall rate in 2015 and 2017) -- but these errors are not relevant to this critique.

 

The problem is that it is not true.