157. Educating Medical Students About Transition From Pediatric To Adult Care: Student Perspectives

Abstract

When studying perceptions of health-risk behavior such as smoking it is important to consider perceptions of both long-term health risks ("LTR"), and short-term health and social risks ("STR"), benefits, and addiction separately. Our hypothesis is that short-term health and social risks, benefits, and addiction will be more strongly associated with behavior among adolescents compared to older adults as adolescents are less-equipped to consider long-term health risks. Further, measuring specific perceptions of long-term health risks, short-term health and social risks, benefits, and addiction is better than asking only about general perceptions of harm. We undertook data reduction, underlying factor structure identification, scale development, and measurement validation. Methods: Analysis was carried out in three stages, following the same procedure for each product. First, to identify the underlying structure of our perception measures, we used principal component analysis and an analysis of internal consistency. Second, to determine internal consistency, Cronbach's a was computed for each derived factor, and percep-