YRBSS: High School Health Behaviors Including Sexual Orientation

The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) monitors six categories of priority health behaviors among youth, including sexual behaviors related to unintended pregnancy and STIs. This 2015-2017 dataset contains national, state, and local data that uniquely includes two aspects of sexual orientation: sexual identity and sex of sexual contacts. Columns suggest it provides stratified survey results with confidence intervals and sample sizes for risk behaviors.

Use Cases

• Analyzing disparities in Greater_Risk_Data_Value by SexualIdentity and LocationDesc
• Mapping state-level trends in risk behaviors using GeoLocation (state) and Topic
• Comparing confidence intervals for specific questions using Greater_Risk_Low_Confidence_Limit and Greater_Risk_High_Confidence_Limit
• Investigating sample representativeness by Grade and Sample_Size for different survey questions

Strengths

• Includes specific measures of sexual orientation (SexualIdentity and sex of sexual contacts), which are less common in national youth surveys.
• Provides data at national, state, and local levels, allowing for geographic comparison.
• Contains statistical measures like confidence limits (Greater_Risk_Low_Confidence_Limit) and Sample_Size for assessing estimate reliability.

Limitations

• Conflicting metadata: one platform lists a license ('other-license-specified') while others show none, creating uncertainty for reuse.
• Key metadata like row count, total size, and definitive author are missing from all provided sources.
• The data's temporal coverage is ambiguous, described as '2015-2017' but also specified as containing 'data from 2015'.

Provenance

Source

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) via data.cdc.gov

Collection Method

Survey data collected through the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS).

Time Range

2015-2017

Freshness

2026-03-17 16:53:37.128972

Geography

National, state, and local data within the United States.