The Student Survey of Risk Factors<\/strong>, commonly administered and recognized internationally as the Communities That Care Youth Survey (CTC-YS)<\/a>, is an epidemiological, self-report assessment instrument designed to measure the comprehensive matrix of adolescent risk and protective factors across multiple social-ecological domains. Developed by Michael W. Arthur, J. David Hawkins, and Richard F. Catalano at the Social Development Research Group (University of Washington), the instrument translates decades of longitudinal developmental psychopathology and prevention science research into an operational public health diagnostic tool. The survey systematically captures factors predicting youth problem behaviors, specifically substance abuse<\/a>, delinquency, school dropout, violent conduct, and teen pregnancy. Structured across four primary ecological domains\u2014community, family, school, and peer-individual\u2014the CTC-YS evaluates specific risk factors (e.g., perceived availability of drugs, community disorganization, poor family management, academic failure, interaction with antisocial peers) and protective factors (e.g., opportunities and rewards for prosocial involvement, healthy beliefs, and clear standards for behavior).<\/p>\n Psychometrically validated across statewide and national normative cohorts comprising hundreds of thousands of students across grades 6, 8, 10, and 12, the instrument demonstrates robust psychometric properties. Confirmatory factor analyses consistently substantiate the multidimensional, domain-specific latent structure. Internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha) for the core risk and protective scales predominantly range from .70 to .88, displaying robust temporal stability and structural invariance across diverse racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender subpopulations. Longitudinal epidemiological trials have demonstrated the high predictive validity of the scale scores in forecasting subsequent substance initiation and violent delinquency. Furthermore, the CTC-YS features unique validity verification mechanisms, including embedded fictive drug items (e.g., derbisol) and social-desirability cross-checks to screen invalid respondent protocols, ensuring high epidemiological integrity for community prevention planning and program evaluation.<\/p>\n Communities That Care Youth Survey, CTC-YS, Student Survey of Risk Factors, Risk and Protective Factor Framework, Social Development Model, adolescent substance use, youth delinquency, prevention science, psychometrics, epidemiological assessment, school health psychology.<\/p>\n The survey instrument was developed by leading scholars in prevention science, developmental criminology, and social welfare at the Social Development Research Group (SDRG), School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States:<\/p>\n The developmental and longitudinal validation work was funded and supported through sustained collaborative grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)<\/a>, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) within SAMHSA, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).<\/p>\n The overarching purpose of the Student Survey of Risk Factors is to provide an empirical, epidemiological assessment of the prevalence of adolescent problem behaviors alongside the precise causal antecedents that elevate the probability of those behaviors (risk factors) or buffer against them (protective factors). Rather than treating adolescent antisocial actions or substance use disorders as isolated phenotypic outcomes, the instrument operationalizes the public health paradigm: effective prevention necessitates diagnosing the localized, underlying etiology within a population before prescribing targeted, evidence-based interventions.<\/p>\n From a clinical and public health perspective, the scale functions within the Communities That Care (CTC)<\/a> operating system. This structured system empowers community prevention coalitions, school boards, and public health departments to identify specific, elevated risk profiles and depressed protective profiles within specific jurisdictions (e.g., school districts, municipalities, or regional counties). By profiling local youth at key developmental inflection points (typically grades 6, 8, 10, and 12, corresponding to chronological ages 11–18), stakeholders can deploy targeted, evidence-based programs cataloged in repositories such as Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development<\/em>. This eliminates arbitrary, non-evidence-based intervention funding.<\/p>\n In research contexts, the scale functions as an essential, high-resolution instrument for developmental psychologists, criminologists, and sociologists conducting longitudinal panel studies, structural equation modeling (SEM), and randomized controlled prevention trials. Its theoretical rationale rests upon the empirically proven observation that common adverse adolescent outcomes\u2014substance abuse, violent behavior, juvenile crime, academic attrition, and precocious sexual activity\u2014share common developmental risk and protective precursors across the ecological landscape. By concurrently measuring these multi-systemic constructs alongside 30-day and lifetime prevalence rates of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, stimulants, inhalants, and weapons offenses, the survey establishes an integrated platform for structural, predictive, and causal analysis.<\/p>\n The Student Survey of Risk Factors is built upon a multidimensional, social-ecological taxonomy of human development. It conceptualizes adolescent outcomes as the dynamic intersection of risk factors and protective factors embedded across four distinct developmental spheres: Community, Family, School, and Peer-Individual domains.<\/p>\n The foundational architecture of the CTC-YS is rooted in the Social Development Model (SDM)<\/strong>, formulated by J. David Hawkins and Richard F. Catalano (1996). The SDM is a developmental, social-ecological theory that synthesizes three central perspectives within criminology and sociology: Social Control Theory (Hirschi, 1969)<\/a>, Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977)<\/a>, and Differential Association Theory (Sutherland, 1947)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The SDM hypothesizes that human behavior is organized through social development pathways established early in childhood and reinforced through adolescence. According to the model, an individual develops bonds to social units\u2014such as family, school, peers, and neighborhood communities\u2014through four primary conditions: (1) Opportunities<\/em> for constructive involvement within the unit, (2) the adolescent’s actual developmental and social Skills<\/em> to participate effectively, (3) consistent, predictable Rewards and Recognition<\/em> for prosocial participation, and (4) the reciprocal emergence of a strong Social Bond<\/em>, comprised of emotional attachment, commitment, and belief in the moral order of the unit.<\/p>\n When the socialization unit adheres to prosocial behavioral standards, strong social bonds insulate the youth against deviant impulses and antisocial peer pressures. Conversely, if an adolescent is socialized into units dominated by antisocial norms\u2014such as drug-using peers or delinquent family networks\u2014the same bonding mechanism increases deviance via observational modeling, differential reinforcement, and shared moral rationalizations. Furthermore, when social control structures fail (e.g., poor parental monitoring, school disorganization, absence of neighborhood reinforcement), social bonds fracture, leaving the adolescent vulnerable to impulsive, sensation-seeking, and externalizing behavioral trajectories.<\/p>\n The CTC-YS operationalizes the SDM by providing simultaneous measurement of the social learning conditions, bonding variables, and structural ecological contexts that balance the trajectory between prosocial thriving and destructive behavioral outcomes.<\/p>\n The construct, convergent, criterion, and predictive validity of the Student Survey of Risk Factors has been rigorously documented across diverse developmental cohorts and community-randomized epidemiological trials (Arthur et al., 2002; Glaser et al., 2005; Hawkins et al., 2008).<\/p>\n Construct validity was established through initial and iterative validation samples aggregating more than 150,000 public school students across multiple U.S. states (Arthur et al., 2002). Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the observed survey indicators accurately conform to the multidimensional latent factor constructs hypothesized by the risk and protective framework. Goodness-of-fit indices supported the empirical distinctiveness of scales across all four ecological domains (RMSEA ≤ .05, CFI ≥ .92, TLI ≥ .90). Measurement invariance testing across gender, grade levels (6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th), and racial\/ethnic groups confirmed structural stability, demonstrating that the underlying psychometric properties are preserved across diverse demographic groups (Glaser et al., 2005)<\/span>.<\/p>\n Convergent validity has been repeatedly substantiated through high, statistically significant correlations between the CTC-YS substance use prevalence scales and comparable epidemiological surveillance systems, including the national Monitoring the Future<\/em> (MTF) study and the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System<\/em> (YRBSS). CTC-YS domain risk scores consistently demonstrate strong positive correlations with actual past-30-day and lifetime consumption of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and illicit substances, alongside self-reported violent crime and weapons possession. Discriminant validity is evidenced by the negative correlations between prosocial protective factor scales (e.g., school opportunities, family bonding) and antisocial outcomes, as well as the low empirical overlap between externalizing peer delinquency scales and internalizing depressive symptom subscales.<\/p>\n Longitudinal predictive validity has been demonstrated in multi-year community intervention trials. In a 24-community randomized controlled trial of the Communities That Care system, elevated community and school risk scores assessed in Grade 6 demonstrated statistically significant prospective odds ratios for predicting violent behavior, binge drinking, cigarette initiation, and marijuana use by Grade 10 and Grade 12 (Hawkins et al., 2008, 2012). The instrument’s ability to prospectively predict clinical and behavioral divergence across developmental trajectories establishes its ecological validity as a community diagnostic instrument.<\/p>\n The internal consistency and temporal reliability of the Student Survey of Risk Factors have been established through extensive psychometric analyses across large-scale epidemiological deployments.<\/p>\n Across the standard battery of risk and protective subscales, Cronbach’s alpha<\/a> coefficients demonstrate strong internal consistency across developmental cohorts:<\/p>\n Short-term test-retest reliability across 2-to-4-week administration intervals has yielded intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) ranging from .72 to .89 across behavioral prevalence indices and latent risk constructs. Furthermore, stability coefficients observed in multi-wave longitudinal panel assessments show substantial rank-order stability across adjacent developmental years (e.g., Grade 6 to Grade 8 stability coefficients ranging from .55 to .71), demonstrating consistent individual differences amidst expected developmental maturation.<\/p>\n The underlying factor structure of the CTC-YS was validated through rigorous Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) protocols during its primary standardization (Arthur et al., 2002; Glaser et al., 2005).<\/p>\n Initial exploratory factor extraction utilized principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) rotation to account for the expected, theoretically grounded intercorrelations among ecological risk conditions. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses, conducted using robust weighted least squares (WLSMV) estimation to accommodate ordered categorical and polytomous indicator distributions, confirmed the existence of multi-factor hierarchical models nested within each overarching domain:<\/p>\n Standardized item factor loadings across the vast majority of items fall reliably between .52 and .88, confirming high construct indicator specificity. Cross-group CFA models demonstrated full metric and partial scalar invariance across gender and grade cohorts, supporting valid developmental tracking and demographic comparisons.<\/p>\n The instrument is an epidemiological, omnibus, pencil-and-paper or web-administered youth self-report survey. Its operational characteristics are structured as follows:<\/p>\n The Student Survey of Risk Factors \/ Communities That Care Youth Survey was originally developed and standardized between 1995 and 2002<\/strong> by the Social Development Research Group (SDRG) at the University of Washington. Because its development was financed through federal public research awards granted by the National Institutes of Health<\/a> (NIDA), the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the primary survey instruments reside in the public domain<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The survey is freely accessible for non-commercial educational, governmental, community prevention, and academic research purposes. School districts and public health coalitions may reproduce and administer the scale without licensing fees. However, formal commercial platforms, electronic survey hosting providers, and specialized data-processing analytics vendors (such as Channing Bete Company<\/a>, the historical commercial distributor of CTC materials, or specialized university evaluation centers) may charge service fees for automated machine-scannable booklets, web hosting, data aggregation, and localized epidemiological reporting. Researchers using the instrument are expected to maintain the structural integrity of the subscales and provide full author attribution to Arthur, Hawkins, Catalano, and the University of Washington Social Development Research Group.<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
\n
Purpose<\/h2>\n
Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Community Domain<\/h3>\n
\n
2. Family Domain<\/h3>\n
\n
3. School Domain<\/h3>\n
\n
4. Peer-Individual Domain<\/h3>\n
\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Structural Validity<\/h3>\n
Criterion, Convergent, and Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Predictive and Ecological Validity<\/h3>\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
\n
Test-Retest Stability<\/h3>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
EFA and CFA Procedures<\/h3>\n
\n
Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
NO!<\/code> (definitely not true \/ strongly disagree), no<\/code> (mostly not true \/ disagree), yes<\/code> (mostly true \/ agree), YES!<\/code> (definitely true \/ strongly agree). The differential capitalization provides clear cognitive differentiation for younger respondents.<\/li>\nVery Wrong<\/code>, Wrong<\/code>, A Little Bit Wrong<\/code>, Not Wrong at All<\/code>.<\/li>\nVery Hard<\/code>, Sort of Hard<\/code>, Sort of Easy<\/code>, Very Easy<\/code>.<\/li>\nNone of my friends<\/code>, 1 of my friends<\/code>, 2 of my friends<\/code>, 3 of my friends<\/code>, 4 of my friends<\/code>.<\/li>\nNever Have<\/code>, 10 or Younger<\/code>, 11<\/code>, 12<\/code>, 13<\/code>, 14<\/code>, 15<\/code>, 16<\/code>, 17 or Older<\/code>.<\/li>\nNever<\/code> to 40+ Times<\/code>, and specific 30-day quantitative counts (e.g., 0 Occasions<\/code>, 1-2 Occasions<\/code>, … 40 or More Occasions<\/code>).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n
Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
\n
13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n