Minnesota Survey Reveals Behaviors, Attitudes
My 12-year-old son Sebastian didn’t say much last spring about taking the 2010 Minnesota Student Survey. It was just another one of those fill-in-the-bubble tests to him. But the answers he and more than 100,000 other students provided offer a wealth of information about the behaviors and attitudes of youth throughout the state.
The survey is administered every three years to sixth, ninth and 12th-graders in the state’s public schools. It’s also offered to students of all grades in alternative schools and in juvenile correctional facilities.
Since the 2010 results were released in November, school districts and other organizations have been analyzing the responses. Voluntary and anonymous, the survey asks questions about topics including alcohol and drug use, bullying, and connections to parents and school. High school students also are given questions on sexual activity.
valuable data
“It’s incredibly valuable data,” says Ann Kinney, senior research scientist with the Minnesota Department of Health. “For most of these measures, there is no other source for children in the state. It’s hard to collect data from children.”
Positive statewide trends for 2010 indicate that more Minnesota students are planning to attend college, are wearing their seat belts more often, and are drinking less alcohol and smoking fewer cigarettes than in previous years. Other statistics are more sobering, like the fact that 20 percent of ninth graders (boys and girls combined) reported they’d had sex, up from 19 percent in 2007, or that 12 percent of 12th grade boys had driven a car three or more times in the past year after using alcohol or drugs.
The Minnesota Departments of Education, Health, Human Services and Public Safety collaborate to implement, analyze, and fund the survey. The results can be broken down into regions, counties, and school districts. Organizations use the data to help them develop youth after-school programs, for example, or to write grants for initiatives like teen alcohol prevention.
In 2010, 88 percent of the state’s 335 public school districts agreed to administer the survey. Overall participation across the three grades was about 71 percent of enrollment.
“We have really high participation, which is terrific,” Kinney says. “It makes it more representative of the state as a whole.”
Reasons that some districts don’t participate include parental concerns about privacy, or difficulty fitting the survey into an already busy testing schedule. Those that do participate benefit because they gain information that can pertain to their specific students.
“That’s really unique in terms of these kinds of data. These are kids in the district, not the state or county. That holds a lot of weight for local decision makers — ‘this is what’s happening here,’” Kinney says.
The smallest districts don’t receive their specific data because the information could be too identifying for those students, but Kinney says they still participate so they can contribute to the county and statewide results.
Some questions remain on the survey year after year, with the exact wording, so the answers can be tracked over time. Other questions have been added and dropped as societal concerns change.
anonymity helps bolster results
Pat Harrison and Barbara Yates developed the Minnesota Student Survey in the late 1980s after the federal drug-free schools act was established. Harrison says to receive the federal grant money, administered by the state, school districts were required to evaluate their drug prevention programs. Instead of having each district conduct its own survey, Harrison proposed that the state implement a comprehensive statewide survey and provide the results to all the districts.
“School districts began to use it wisely, and very creatively,” Harrison says. “I think it became a great tool to engage students, parents, teachers, and school staff.”
Harrison, now research director with the Minneapolis Department of Health and Family Support, says she and Yates met some initial resistance from people who were concerned about students answering questions on topics like sexual activity and drug use. That resistance still pops up occasionally in more socially conservative areas, she says. Most parents, though, are reassured by the survey’s anonymity and understand its value in helping protect teens from the biggest risks to their health and safety.
“It’s important to know what kids think and what behaviors they have so we can develop effective prevention programs,” Harrison says. “I think we’ve seen lot of improvement in terms of choices kids make. We’ve also seen that when prevention funds are cut in weak economic times, the risks go up. The messages have to be repeated with every group of kids.”
Joy Riggs lives and writes in Northfield.
Resources
Minnesota Department of Education
www.education.state.mn.us/mde
Minnesota Department of Health
www.health.state.mn.us/divs/chs/mss/
Minnesota Department of Human Services
www.dhs.state.mn.us/main
