6. Avoidance of binge drinking: Respondents are assigned a value of 1 if they do not report having 5 or more drinks at one sitting on more than one day during the last month, and 0 otherwise. Although this healthy behavior index extends previous research by depicting how adolescents and young adults fare across multiple healthy behaviors over an 11-year period, it is limited in that it provides only a 1/0 score for each healthy behavior at a given age. For example, an individual who smokes two cigarettes a week will receive the same score for non-smoking behaviors as an individual who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day (both receive a score of zero). The benefit of such an approach, however, is that I assign a relatively homogenous group of individuals a score of ‘1’ on each behavior – for example, all individuals with a score of ‘1’ on smoking behaviors have not smoked any tobacco products at all in the last 30 days. Supplemental analyses (described in Section 5) further
support the use of this index in detecting health differences among adolescents and young adults.