Why are students who do not take part in risky behaviors (like smoking or drinking) required repeating their response over and over again in the questionnaire?
There are two reasons. First, since this is a self administered questionnaire, simplicity is very important. A skip pattern, for example, if you answered “no” to question #5, skip to question #8, may not be followed and would lead to problems in data cleaning and validity checking. In this example, any “no” answer on question #5, that also had responses on questions 6 or 7 would be invalidated and lead to an underestimation of those who answered “no” to question #5. The second and more important reason is so that all students are answering the same number of questions. Since the questionnaire is administered in a classroom with peers and sometimes moderated by teachers or other adults known by the students, it’s very important that the time it takes the student to complete the questionnaire do not violate their privacy or offer any information to others about their own behaviors.
