The Adolescent Injury Checklist: An investigation of transport related injuries as reported by Australasian adolescents

Injury is a leading cause of death among adolescents.  Mortality rates resulting from injury among young people reveal strong associations with risk taking behaviour, consistently involving transport (25.5: 100,000 males) and violence (2.3: 100,000 males). The Adolescent Injury Checklist (AIC) (Jelalian et al., 1997; Spirito et al., 2001) is an established self report measure that records injuries experienced by adolescents in the past 6 months (e.g. while driving, bicycling, from physical fights); whether these injuries required medical attention; and whether they occurred in the context of alcohol or other drug use.  It is the only adolescent injury questionnaire known to the researchers, and data has only been reported for American adolescents.
This paper reports on the development of a database of adolescent responses to the AIC in an Australasian sample, and specifically on reported experiences of transport injuries. A sample of 661 Grade 9 students (mean age = 13.6 years) were recruited from four SouthEast Queensland high schools and completed the AIC in class time. The results of this study will be of direct relevance to Queensland and other Australasian health organisations, while also benefiting intervention programs and researchers through the provision of normative figures for Australasian adolescents? injury experiences.