The Taiwan Adolescent to Adult Longitudinal Study (TAALS): Methodology and Cohort Description

Abstract

The objective of the study was to introduce the methodology and report on cohort description of Taiwan Adolescent to Adult Longitudinal Study (TAALS). TAALS is the first nationwide longitudinal survey among Taiwan adolescents, linked with the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) to obtain complete medical records of respondents in the future. The TAALS project employed the principle of probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling method. Data were collected by questionnaire from 18 064 school students participating in 2015 formal survey, with good sample representation via a goodness-of-fit test after weighting adjustments. Through expert evaluation and statistics tests, TAALS shows a well nationally representation, validity, and reliability. Results indicate that the vocational school students had poor healthy behavior than other education systems, supporting the hypothesis that different learning environment will develop different health behaviors. TAALS can serve as a foundation for analyzing health trajectories of Taiwan adolescents.

Keywords

adolescence health behavior cohort study TAALS longitudinal survey

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Burns

Bush

RF.

Marketing Research. 6th ed. London, England: Pearson; 2009.

Pfeffermann

The role of sampling weights when modeling survey data. Int Stat Rev. 1993;61:317-337.

Chen

Chiou

Chen

YH.

Chinese version of the Global Youth Tobacco Survey: cross-cultural instrument adaptation. BMC Public Health. 2008;8:144.

Warren

Riley

Asma

et al . Tobacco use by youth: a surveillance report from the Global Youth Tobacco Survey project. Bull World Health Organ. 2000;78:868-876.

Radloff

LS.

The CES-D scale: a self-report depression scale for research in general population. Appl Psychol Meas. 1977;1:385-401.

Lee

Chen

Weng

LJ.

The psychometric properties of a short form of the CES-D used in the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on aging. Formosa J Ment Health. 2009;22:383-410.

Hamburger

Basile

Vivolo

AM.

Measuring Bullying Victimization, Perpetration, and Bystander Experiences: A Compendium of Assessment Tools. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control; 2011.

, ed. Introduction to the psychological well-being of East Asian youth: the transition from early adolescence to young adulthood. In: The Psychological Well-being of East Asian Youth. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer; 2012:1-26.

Lin

TS.

The effects of family background on tracking of secondary education in Taiwan: a study of the distinction between “academic/vocational” and “public/private” tracking. Soochow J Sociol. 1999;8:35-77.

10.

Mingfu

Yi Zhi

Correlation among students’ family background, academic performance in junior high school, and senior high school tracking in Taiwan [in Chinese]. J Educ Pract Res. 2014; 27:67-98.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.30 MB