I will be following up a cohort of participants who were last interviewed 10 years ago. At the time we used validated measure for all sorts of health, educational and social outcomes suitable for adolescents e.g. Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale. These adolescents are now young adults. Should I be using the same measures I used in previous rounds of data collection to allow for comparability and application of methods such as growth curve modeling, or should I be using validated adult measures?
Hi Franziska,
I believe that it would be wise to use the adult version of the measurement, assuming both tools are indeed measuring the same thing (e.g anxiety). One major factor is of course maturity, so from practical PoV alone, if you use the child scale, it might end up make participants feel treated as kids which would be bad. The other factor is the context fitness (e.g in child scale it could use school context but then now there're at work, or old items were oversimplified since it was for kids) so the old items feel no longer relatable.
Hope this helps.
Goodluck!!
I would use the adult scales otherwise there maybe little variation in the response, and that affects statistical power.
Why can't you use both? I have a 22 year old "child" who as always had severe anxiety issues. I am not sure if he is the type of child you targeted for your study. He has made great progress but I don't think it would be fair to characterize him as an adult
It always depends on your hypotheses. If the better test is by using growth curve modeling, go ahead with that option. You could always show the correlation with the validated measurement, if they are highly correlated (>.5) you could use it and justify it.
Thanks so much for the answers. Yes, I was thinking that adult measures would be more suitable. I don't want to use both because I have to consider participant burden and the battery of tests is already approximately 40 minutes long. I don't want to add to this if I can help it.
The protocol realy should have been established at the time the study was started. It is not usually appropriate practice to change the way a study is conducted after it has started.
Just to clarify. The study has not started. This is an independent follow- up 10 years after the particpiants were originally interviewed for which funding has become available. I agree that protocols are important but the protocol for that original study ended with the original study.
in my opinion ,the adult measures should be used . Over the years the child has grown in terms of physical , mental and emotional growth as well development. hence the child measure is no more relevant . But it is always necessary to write clear protocol on measuring tool and interpretation of results or scales.
It depends on the content of the scales and the construct. A lot of “adult” and “adolescent” measures are pretty similar when it comes down to the items. You could probably retain a lot of the original items and that would give you a lot more flexibility in analyses.
I suggest getting some info too—using factor analysis or other approach, you could create short forms of many of these scales and/or use prior or new analyses to prioritize which measures to retain. Some from the original protocol may bot add much info to your research questions. Good luck!
There was recently a blog post on the Society for Research on Adolescence that offered an approach for this. Not sure if links are allowed here, but check their site for a post titled "How can researchers study developmental constructs over time when age-appropriate measures change as their sample ages?"
It involves developing a conversion formula between two validated instruments, which may not be appropriate for your purposes/sampling. But... in theory... if you can draw a large enough sample, you can develop the conversion formula on half the sample and then test it on the second. That's a lot of work, though.
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