Data Sources for Comparisons With Youth in the General Population

When similar data items are available, comparisons are made between youth with disabilities and the same-age youth in the general population. Data sources for these comparisons include the following:

• The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Wave II (Add Health). Comparison data are taken from public-use data sets from this nationally representative study that explores the health-related behaviors of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 and their associations with young adult outcomes. Data at the individual, family, school, and community levels were collected in two waves in 1994 and 1996. The public-use dataset consists of one-half of the core sample Wave 1 and 2 respondents, chosen at random, and one-half of the oversample of African American adolescents with a parent who has a college degree. The total number of respondents in this dataset is approximately 6,500. Comparison analyses include data from Wave 2 (1996) for youth who were 15 through 19 years old, to match the NLTS2 youth sample; approximately 2,650 cases are in this age range (Udry 1998).¹⁵
  
  
• The National Household Education Survey, 1999 (NHES). The chief goal of the NHES is to describe Americans' educational experiences across the early childhood to adult age range. To monitor educational trends over time, NHES conducts repeated measurements of the same phenomena in different years. The NHES has also fielded one-time surveys on topics of interest to the Department of Education. The NHES has been conducted in the springs of 1991, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005. The most recent data collected from youth themselves are from the 1999 administration; items used here concern perceptions of school and are presented for youth 15 through 19 years old (Nolin et al. 2001). Approximately 3,720 cases are included in this analysis subset.¹⁶
  
  
• The Shell Poll, 1999. Peter D. Hart Research Associates conducted this telephone survey as part of an ongoing survey program sponsored by the Shell Oil Company. It included a representative cross section of 1,015 American¹⁷ high-school-age youth drawn from 505 randomly determined localities throughout the country. The overall results of this survey have a margin of error of ±3.1 percent (Shell Oil Company 1999).

Many of the comparisons between data from NLTS2 and these surveys of the general population use identical data items and response categories. Where there are differences in the wording of items and/or response categories, these are pointed out in footnotes.

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