The Oregon Healthy Teens Survey (OHT) is the one state-sponsored survey designed to monitor the health and well being of adolescents. An anonymous and voluntary research-based survey, the OHT is designed and administered through a collaborative group of Oregon state agencies including the Department of Human Services, the Department of Education, the Governor’s Commission on Juvenile Justice, the Commission on Children and Families and the Oregon Progress Board. The survey instruments have been revised annually since 1991 and this year consisted of one version for both 8th and 11th graders, containing 189 separate response items.

This year’s survey was conducted among over four in ten of all 8th and 11th graders statewide. Surveyed schools were selected through five processes: As part of a statewide random sample, as part of the sample for Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), as a Coordinated School Health (CSH) school, as part of the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) Tobacco Prevention evaluation (there was some overlap between these first four groups) or as a volunteer school. The surveys were conducted by either ORI, for schools under their funding, or by a private contractor to DHS, who instructed classroom teachers in proctoring the survey.

Surveys were returned from 30,002 students, representing an overall response rate of 79.5% of those sampled. Of these, 3.2% were excluded because of extensive patterns of discrepant and/or dubious (extreme) answers, 4.8% were excluded because their grade level could not be determined or because of missing gender information. This left 27,622 valid surveys (92.1% of the total received, with 14,708 from 8th grade, 11,028 from 11th grade, and 1,886 from 9th, 10th, and 12th grade as part of the YRBS sample, in 34 counties. There was no data collected at all from Lincoln and Josephine counties. Tillamook county had no 11th grade data.

The surveys from schools that were part of the statewide random sample (11,829 8th graders, 8,386 11th graders) are weighted, based on district size information, to be representative of all 8th or 11th grade students within a particular county or the state.
The published reports for counties and states include weighted percentages for accurate prevalence estimates, but often also include unweighted counts so readers know how many surveys make up each response. Because of the weighting, any percentage recalculation based on the unweighted counts will differ slightly from the published percentages. The published percentages accurately represent county and state prevalence with an overall statewide margin of error (at 95% confidence interval) at ± 0.7% for the 8th grade and ± 0.9% for the 11th grade. The exact margin of error for each question is smaller and varies, depending on the percentage estimated for that particular question. The margins of error for county estimates are slightly larger, depending on the numbers of surveys collected in the county, but are generally smaller than ± 5%.

OHT county-level and statewide results are available on this website. In order to ensure a representative sample, if a particular county had less than 50 students at a grade level, their results are only reported as a composite measure with neighboring counties. Data collected from volunteer classrooms or volunteer schools were not included in the statewide or county-level reporting.

For more detailed information, you can view the long form report (pdf) of the 2005 Oregon Healthy Teens methodology.