2021 · Study · English
A Comparison of Cut Points for Measuring Risk Factors for Adolescent Substance Use and Antisocial Behaviors in the U.S. and Colombia
Brown, E. C., Montero-Zamora, P., Cardozo-Macías, F., Reyes-Rodríguez, M. F., Briney, J. S., Mejía-Trujillo, J., & Pérez-Gómez, A.
Brown, E. C., Montero-Zamora, P., Cardozo-Macías, F., Reyes-Rodríguez, M. F., Briney, J. S., Mejía-Trujillo, J., & Pérez-Gómez, A. (2021). A Comparison of Cut Points for Measuring Risk Factors for Adolescent Substance Use and Antisocial Behaviors in the U.S. and Colombia. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(2), 470. doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020470
Summary
Methodological study asking whether the US cut-points that define “high risk” on Communities That Care Youth Survey risk-factor scales can be used validly in other countries. Using large samples of adolescents from Colombia and the United States, the authors compared the proportion of young people classified as high risk on 18 risk factors under US-derived and Colombia-derived cut-points. The two sets produced significantly different proportions (p < 0.05) for 38.9% of the risk factors in Grade 6, 61.1% in Grade 8 and 66.6% in Grade 10. Where differences occurred, Colombian cut-points were preferable in almost every case, and the size of the discrepancy depended on the type of factor, with drug-specific factors behaving differently from non-drug-specific ones. The authors call for large national datasets and country-specific cut-points to avoid misclassifying youth. The finding bears directly on European CTC sites, which must decide whether to import US thresholds or norm their own.