The Healthy Allegheny Teen Survey (HATS)

This survey is a collaboration among school districts, University of Pittsburgh Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, youth-serving community partners, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research, and the Allegheny County Health Department. The Pittsburgh Study (TPS) is joining the collaboration to assist with dissemination, analysis, and to introduce student-centered data literacy and storytelling.

This survey engages young people (9th to 12th grade) around critically important data about youth strengths, health behaviors, and barriers to care seeking to guide interventions for youth in schools and in their neighborhoods. A similar survey was conducted in 2014 (county-wide) and in 2018 (Pittsburgh Public Schools). Distribution of the 2023 survey spans from late February through Spring.

Respective school districts will receive their district and school-specific data to guide distribution of services and supports for their students and to inform prevention and intervention efforts to address the physical and mental health as well as social needs of students. TPS will use bar graphs to visualize the data and provide state and national comparisons where those data are available. We will create confidential reports for each school in addition to an aggregated report that will be shared with collaborators and school administrators. 

TPS will work with each school district on a communications plan, which will likely include a school board presentation, review of confidential reports for each high school with the high school principal, superintendent, and other key school personnel, and potentially offering presentations in town hall-type settings, all with the goal of defining areas for health improvement and promoting adolescent thriving.  

De-identified data will be shared via multiple outlets including the website for the Allegheny County Health Department. Community members and high school students will be invited to work with The Pittsburgh Study Data Accessibility Committee on data literacy and storytelling related to these data. We will work with school and community partners, area foundations, and other collaborators from The Pittsburgh Study to use these data to inform intervention efforts. 

For more information or to schedule a meeting, please contact Dr. Elizabeth Miller at: elizabeth.miller@chp.edu

Resources

Additional community resources for Allegheny County.