Reliability of adolescents' self-report of recent recreational injury

To assess the reliability of adolescents' self-report of recent recreational injury.

Identical written questionnaires were administered twice in a 3-week period to 75 randomly selected adolescents (aged 11-12 years and 15-16 years) in state primary and secondary schools in South Australia, Australia. The questionnaires sought information on injury sustained in the previous week. Parents of 60 of the adolescents were contacted in the same week as one of the questionnaire administrations, to verify their adolescent's most recent injury self-report. Intraclass and Pearson correlation coefficients provided evidence of agreement between responses, and stability of measure.

There was high stability and good agreement between the parent and adolescent responses provided in the same week, suggesting that adolescents accurately reported recent recreational injury. The poor stability and low agreement between repeated adolescent responses over the 3-week period indicated not poor recall, but the changing nature of mostly minor recreational injury. These findings suggest that the nature of the injury reported in the first questionnaire had changed by the time of the second questionnaire administration, and that this was accurately reported.

Confidence can be placed in adolescents' self-reports of recreational injury in the preceding week.