A New Way to Gauge Students' Basic Needs

As a demographic variable in educational research, household income carries a lot of weight, perhaps more than it can bear. It doesn’t tell us whether a teenager has a quiet place to study, a safe neighborhood, or an adult to call when something goes wrong — just some of the material and social needs that decades of research have linked to healthy adolescent development.

A new tool, the Adolescent Necessities Index (ANI), measures the presence of these and other key conditions in teens’ lives by asking students themselves. Developed by Andrew T. Jebb, Maya Brown-Hunt, Laurence Steinberg and Angela L. Duckworth, the ANI is a 10-question survey of adolescent needs that students aged 13 to 18 can complete in about 30 seconds.

Using the ANI in a nationally representative study conducted via the Gallup Panel™, the authors found that roughly half of U.S. adolescents lack at least one of the 10 conditions — something household income data alone could not have revealed. The index also predicted student outcomes beyond what socioeconomic status (SES) indicators captured on their own.

Why a New Measure Is Needed

For decades, schools have relied on proxies for student needs, such as household income, parents’ education level, and free/reduced-price lunch eligibility. But as developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner noted long ago, these function as “social addresses” rather than direct measures of what the individual is experiencing. Two students with similar household incomes may nevertheless experience very different conditions. One may have emotional support, physical safety and access to activities outside of school; another may have none of these.

The existing tools also have practical limitations. Adolescents cannot reliably report their parents’ income or education level; household income doesn’t fully capture a family’s financial means; and research suggests that enrollment in free or reduced-price lunch programs is not a reliable indicator of family income.

The ANI solves these problems by asking students about their own circumstances using 10 plain-language, yes-or-no questions with a “prefer not to say” option. The approach is easily understood by students aged 13 to 18 across a range of backgrounds and reading levels:

1. Do you have a reliable way to get to places — like stores and appointments?
2. Does your family worry about losing their home?
3. If you get sick, does someone take you to the doctor?
4. Do you live in a neighborhood where it is safe to take a walk after dark?
5. Do you have your own quiet space at home to relax or do homework?
6. Do you have access to fruit and vegetables every day?
7. If you had trouble with schoolwork, is there someone who could help?
8. If you wanted to do a sport, musical instrument, or hobby, could your family pay for the equipment and fees?
9. Is there an adult you can go to when you are upset or have a problem?
10. Is there an adult in your life who believes you can reach your goals if you try?

To be clear, the ANI is not a trauma-screening instrument, which would identify students requiring more significant interventions. It is an upgrade to the basic-needs identification that researchers and educators already do.

How the ANI Was Developed and Validated

The development of the ANI involved several stages, described in detail in a paper recently published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

The investigators began with a comprehensive review of decades of research across psychology, economics, medicine and education. They also looked at existing tools such as healthcare screening instruments, foster care checklists, poverty and deprivation scales, and social and economic surveys, supplemented by interviews with prominent social scientists. This work generated an initial pool of potential items.

The team then conducted formal content validation, gathering importance ratings for the potential survey items from 22 subject matter experts as well as a nationally representative panel of 101 adolescents. Both groups rated each item and suggested additions, ensuring the final pool reflected perspectives from researchers as well as the population the tool is designed to serve.

The resulting 24 items were then tested in a large longitudinal study conducted through the Character Lab Research Network, collecting data from thousands of students across 24 U.S. middle and high schools in two waves. This phase validated the items against GPA and other objective school records, as well as students’ self-reported wellbeing, and confirmed that the scores were stable over a five-month period. A data-driven algorithm was then used to evaluate nearly 2 million possible 10-item combinations to arrive at the final 10-item scale.

The authors deployed these 10 questions in a second study, conducted in partnership with Gallup using a nationally representative sample of nearly 1,900 adolescent-parent pairs. The study, conducted in English and Spanish using the probability-based Gallup Panel, established national norms for the items and overall index. It also confirmed that adolescents' self-reported access to needs aligned closely with their parents' independent assessments, and it demonstrated the scale's validity against additional outcomes, including physical and mental health.

What the Research Found

The Gallup study found that roughly half of U.S. adolescents lacked at least one necessity measured by the ANI. Neighborhood safety was the least common (about 76% reported having it), followed by the ability to afford extracurricular activities (about 78%). The most common were access to medical care (about 97%) and having an adult who offers encouragement (about 96%).

Analysis of the Character Lab data revealed two underlying dimensions — material necessities (transportation, housing, nutrition, safety, medical care, quiet space, and extracurriculars) and social necessities (academic support, emotional support, and encouragement). Because the two dimensions are highly correlated, the authors combined them into a single metric that they call “Access to Necessities,” appropriate for most research and screening applications.

Across both the Character Lab and Gallup studies, students with higher ANI scores consistently showed better outcomes: higher GPAs; greater emotional, social and academic thriving; better physical and mental health; and greater life satisfaction. Critically, the ANI predicted these outcomes even after accounting for traditional measures of socioeconomic status. In other words, the ANI didn’t merely replicate what SES captured — it added meaningfully to it.

The ANI also demonstrated strong measurement quality across both studies. Its component questions were highly consistent with one another (ω = .80, α = .79), and, as noted, scores remained stable over five months (r = .63). When parents completed a parallel version of the index questions, their reports correlated strongly with their children’s (r = .74), suggesting adolescents are reliable reporters of their own circumstances.

Importantly, the scale’s properties held equally across age groups, genders, and racial and ethnic subgroups, meaning ANI scores can be meaningfully compared across these demographic categories without concern that the measure functions differently for different groups.

Putting the ANI to Work

The ANI has many potential applications for researchers studying adolescent development, educational outcomes or social disparities. It can be used as a standalone needs assessment — for example, to identify study eligibility or screen participants. Embedded in surveys, it can be used as a covariate or control variable, as an outcome variable (such as to evaluate intervention effects or to track whether access to necessities changes over time), or as a tool for comparing need across samples, populations or sites. It is brief enough to include without burdening respondents, validated against objective outcomes, and benchmarked using a nationally representative sample. It is thus practical for large-scale research as well as targeted studies.

For schools and districts, the ANI offers a fast, validated way to measure the nature of unmet student needs across a population. Administered as part of a student survey, it can reveal not only how many students are lacking key conditions, but also which conditions. That specificity matters because knowing that students in a given school or district face significant barriers of a particular type — whether that be transportation, safety or emotional support — can point educators toward the right solutions.

For states and policymakers, comparable and trackable ANI data across districts can reliably inform decisions about where resources are most needed.

Whether used on its own or alongside existing SES indicators, the ANI provides a clearer picture of students’ needs than the proxies ever could. The index is free to use, available in English and Spanish, and takes little time to administer. The items, scoring instructions and analytic code are publicly available through the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/s6z8r/.