Letter from J. Richard Udry on Research Impact of Tiahrt Amendment

July 4, 2001

This letter is to comment on the Tiahrt Amendment to HR 1 (ESEA Reauthorization) as reflected in the May 23, 2001, Congressional Record.  

The purpose of the amendment is laudable-- to make sure that parents have a voice in determining the participation of their children in sensitive surveys administered at school. But the remedy proposed--to require that the school obtain signed parental consent before permitting children to participate--has damaging consequences for social research that is important for policy-making and for scientific knowledge about school-aged children. The discussion in the Congressional Record indicates that those participating did not understand the damage to policy-making that would result from the amendment.  

All such surveys are required to have approval of Institutional Review Boards for the Protection of Human Subjects (IRBs) at the universities or government agencies initiating them. Current practice is to allow school policy to determine whether signed consent is required, but to give parents the right to opt out their children from participation after informing them of the surveys. Schools ordinarily allow children to participate unless the parents, upon being informed in writing about the content of the surveys, tell the school in writing that they want to exclude their own children. Schools invoke signed consent only if they decide the survey content is especially sensitive.   Experience in doing surveys in schools indicates that irrespective of the survey content, when parents are ask to give signed consent and return it to the school, most parents do not respond. Follow-up research shows that this is not because most parents object to the survey, but because they simply never get around to responding. When parents are ask to respond if they DO NOT want their children to participate, only one or two per cent of the parents opt their children out.  

I want to share my own experience with school participation in the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), for which I am the Principal Investigator. This is a federally-funded survey of a nationally representative sample of Adolescents, funded by NICHD. In the initial phase of the study (in 1994-5) we administered a very innocuous one-period self-administered survey in a representative sample of schools (private, parochial, and public). Twenty per cent of the selected schools declined to participate on grounds that they could not give up the class time for the purpose. In all participating schools, Add Health sent out two letters to the parents of each child.  

One letter was carried via the child, and the other was addressed to the parent by post. Of the participating schools, five per cent required signed consent, even though we considered that there were few if any questions on the survey on topics enumerated in the Tiahrt Amendment.    In those schools, only 25 to 40 per cent of parents returned signed consent forms. In the schools only requiring signed response to opt out of the survey, only about one per cent of the parents opted their children out. When 25 to 40 per cent of the children participate, the results become very biased, and the validity of the survey is undermined. Had Add Health been required to use signed consent for participation, the research would have been impossible, because we could not have believed the results on account of bias in participation.  

Add Health is a very prominent study, and has been important in policy-making circles in helping to identify the risks of adolescence and formulate policies to increase the health of youth. But many other surveys using school questionnaires play an important role. Among these are the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a periodic government survey under the administration of CDC. The YRBS tracks trends in risk behavior in a national sample of American schools, and is important in informing lawmakers and program administrators of problems that are emerging or improving. But the YRBS, along with several other school surveys, would not be credible were it required to use the rules laid down in this amendment, and would have to be cancelled.  

Therefore I believe that the best policy is for Congress to leave this issue alone, and trust the good judgment of local school officials to implement the sensible policies now in place at the local level.    

Sincerely,    

J. Richard Udry Kenan 
Professor of Maternal and Child Health/Sociology 
Carolina Population Center 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Back to Top^