Montana is proud to have completed over three decades of participation in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). These results are valuable to educators, school boards, and communities, including parents and students, in understanding the health risks of Montana students, enabling districts to design local health and physical education curriculum…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) has a long history of providing representative data on the nation's high school students. These assessments are crucial to CDC's mission of identifying health behaviors and experiences; understanding the determinants and co-occurrence of risks;…

Problem: Sexual identity and sex of sexual contacts can both be used to identify sexual minority youth. Significant health disparities exist between sexual minority and nonsexual minority youth. However, not enough is known about health-related behaviors that contribute to negative health outcomes among sexual minority youth and how the prevalence…

Problem: Priority health-risk behaviors contribute to the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among youth and adults. Population-based data on these behaviors at the national, state, and local levels can help monitor the effectiveness of public health interventions designed to protect and promote the health of youth nationwide. Reporting…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term study of American adolescents, college students, and adults through age 50. The study is supported under a series of investigator-initiated, competing research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and has been conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research…

Due to indiscriminate experimentation with drugs and sex, teens are increasingly at risk of contracting AIDS. Goals of prevention include reducing the panic and misinformation surrounding the disease, helping teenagers delay sexual intercourse, ensuring condom use, and preventing I.V. drug use. AIDS prevention as a shared responsibility includes…

This fact sheet presents several data tables related to teen pregnancy, birth rates, abortion, contraceptive use, and sexually transmitted diseases. The data reveal that during the 1990s, rates of teen childbearing have declined, returning to the levels reached in the mid-1980s. Declines come from a lower proportion of teens having sex and a…

This report presents data on the current status of adolescent health. Many of the measures of health status are shown by single year of age or by 2- or 3-year age intervals to highlight the changes that occur in health status as adolescents move through this important developmental period. Summary measures combining 5- or 10-year age groups (the…