The Global School-based Student Health Survey is designed to provide accurate data on health behaviours and protective factors among students to:

• help countries develop priorities, establish programmes, and advocate for resources for school health and youth health programmes and policies
• allow international agencies, countries, and others to make comparisons across countries regarding the prevalence of health behaviours and protective factors, and
• establish trends in the prevalence of health behaviours and protective factors by country for use in evaluation of school health and youth health promotion.

The GSHS is a school-based survey conducted primarily among students aged 13–17 years using a standardized scientific sample selection process, common school-based methodology and self-administered questionnaire, which can be completed during one regular class period.

Countries develop their country-specific questionnaire using the standardized core and core-expanded questions, to which they may add country-specific questions. More detail on the questionnaire is available on the GSHS questionnaire page. The questions are translated into the appropriate language of instruction for the students and pilot tested for comprehension. All questions share common characteristics to enhance the flow of the survey and comprehension by the student. To help protect student privacy, no skip patterns are allowed.

Capacity building

WHO provides technical support to countries throughout the planning and implementation of their survey including:

• help with questionnaire development
• help with sample design and selection
• training of Survey Coordinators and progamme planners
• provision of survey implementation handbooks and other materials;
• provision and scanning of computer-scannable answer sheets
• data editing and weighting
• provision/facilitation of funding and resources to assist countries.

Two types of training workshops are provided to survey coordinators from each country wishing to implement a GSHS. The first workshop builds the capacity of survey coordinators to implement the survey in their country following common sampling and survey administration procedures that ensure the surveys are standardized and comparable across countries and that data are of the highest quality. The second workshop, conducted after the field work is complete, builds the capacity of survey coordinators to conduct data analysis and generate a country-specific report and fact sheet.

Data policy

GSHS data release and publication policies and procedures are based on the following guiding principles:

• GSHS data are owned by the official country-level agency (ex. ministry of health) conducting or sponsoring the survey
• public health and scientific advancement are best served by an open and timely exchange of data and data analyses.
• the privacy of participating schools and students must be protected.
• data quality must be maintained.

Upon completion of data processing, a fact sheet is generated summarizing the data for students aged 13–17 years from the core GSHS questionnaire modules. Once the survey coordinator has approved the fact sheet or two months after it is generated, whichever comes first, the fact sheet is published on the GSHS website. The survey coordinator then has two years to produce any country-specific reports and other publications they desire before their survey data are made available on the GSHS website. This is called “the two-year window”. WHO strongly recommends that each country develop at least one country-specific report during this time. These country-specific reports are placed on the GSHS website as soon as they are completed and released in-country. At the end of the two-year window, the dataset and code book associated with the core GSHS questionnaire modules are made available to the public on the WHO website. Data from core-expanded questions and country-specific questions are not made public. No school or student identifiers are included in the public use data set.