Predicting hazardous lifestyles among adolescents based on health-risk assessment data

Abstract The Rhode Island Department of Health has developed simple and convenient health risk appraisal (HRA) systems for adults, high-school students and college students. Using HRA data collected on 11,652 high-school students, this paper examines the discriminatory power of two mental health questions as predictors of high risk, unhealthy or dangerous behavior. Both questions, when examined separately, show that students who respond that "life is never worth living" and who report that "they never have emotional support available" take proportionally more and greater risks than their fellow students who have happier outlooks and long-term emotional support. By combining responses from both questions, a typology was developed that might identify a more vulnerable, higher risk-taking subgroup; that is, students who felt life was not worth living and who also had no available emotional support. Further refinement of this approach could produce a useful predictive tool to identify students who are at serious risk for premature disability and death and who could benefit from early therapeutic help.