Understanding youth: using qualitative methods to verify quantitative community indicators

Community- and individual-level data were collected from interviews with 1,294 boys and girls, 13 to 19 years old, in three impoverished urban communities of Beirut. Univariate analyses of variables provide quantitative indicators of adolescents' lives and communities. Researchers including the authors, interested in using these indicators to plan for community interventions with youth in the Palestinian refugee camp, discuss the pertinent results with youth from the camp in six focus groups. The authors find that many indicators misrepresent the situation of youth in the camp. For example, adolescents may have underreported cigarette and argileh (water pipe) smoking (8.3% and 22.4%, respectively) because of the lack of social desirability of these behaviors; other questions may have been misunderstood, such as perceived health and health compared to others. Also, important issues for them such as drug abuse, violence, and school problems were not asked. Implications for intervention research are discussed.