One approach to determining the validity of self-reported drug use measures is to examine the extent of logically inconsistent responses over time. Because lifetime use logically should never decline, the rate of subsequent recanting of earlier reported lifetime use provides relevant evidence on validity. In this chapter, recanting rates are examined in nationally representative samples of high school seniors (18-year-olds) surveyed in the Monitoring the Future study as they are followed up on seven occasions through age 32. For the illegal drugs examined (marijuana, cocaine, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)), recanting rates prove to be quite modest, but for the psychotherapeutic drugs, they were more substantial, possibly because of their greater definitional ambiguity. In general, there were no large individual differences in recanting rates as a function of sex, household composition, community size, or education level. Consistent with previous work, minorities (particularly African Americans) had somewhat higher rates of recanting on the illegal drugs. So did respondents in certain occupations, namely, the military and police/firefighting. In general, however, the evidence is quite good for validity of self-reported (by mail) lifetime use of the illegal drugs in young adulthood.

Policy relevant conclusions emerge when meta-analytic techniques are used to achieve consensus out of the inconsistencies found in individual research studies. Extensive search procedures located 120 school-based drug prevention programs that evaluated success

2001 Suggested Citation:

1) Ensure voluntary and confidential participation for students and parents; 2) Provide a single survey framework encompassing topics of risk behavior and influences on youth behavior for a comprehensive look at youth well-being; 3) Obtain a participation rate of at least 60 percent from the randomly selected statewide samples; 4) Meet the criteria of the National Cancer Institute grant through which the survey project was primarily funded; 5) Collect a general 9 th-12 th grade sample for comparison to national Youth Risk Behavior Survey data; and 6) Allow as many Oregon public high schools and middle schools as possible the opportunity to participate, ensuring our ability to provide localized reports to schools and counties. Participation in the OHT was voluntary at every level. District school superintendents were initially contacted in the fall of 2000 to invite their participation and to request permission to contact their school principals. If district approval was obtained, the school’s principal was

Since illicit drug use is by definition illegal, the tasks of measuring incidence and prevalence and charting the course of the epidemic have fallen to survey researchers over the past 30 years. Although survey methods have obvious advantages over indirect measures such as arrests, seizures, and treatment admissions, they are frequently criticized because they rely on valid self-reporting of sensitive and highly stigmatized behavior. Validation studies conducted before the mid-1980s involving known samples of drug users or urinalysis techniques suggested that drug use was fairly accurately reported in self-report surveys. However, more recent validation studies conducted with criminal justice and former treatment clients using improved urinalysis techniques and hair analyses demonstrate that self-report methods miss a lot of recent drug use. A review of the research literature suggests that neither self-reports nor bioassays are wholly accurate, and both have inherent problems. However, because self-report measures are necessary to understand the complexity of causal and correlational attributes of drug abuse, it is necessary to determine what can be done to improve valid self-reporting. This chapter examines the research literature on validation studies to provide an overview of what is known about the accuracy of selfreported drug use.

This chapter reviews the literature on factors related to quality of self-report data on drug use and discusses two series of empirical studies investigating the quality of those data. One set of analyses examined the quality of the longitudinal retrospective self-report from narcotics addicts, including validity of recent narcotics use, reliability of various measures, stability of relationships among these measures, and pattern reliability among latent constructs. Results contribute strongly to confidence in the validity of the relationships among these data derived from addicts ’ self-report. The second set of analyses focused on validity of self-reported drug use among high-risk groups, including samples from sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics, hospital emergency rooms (ERs), and jails. Results suggest that the accuracy of self-report of recent drug use varies by the sample sources, drug types, and subject characteristics. Targeting these high-risk groups may improve prevalence estimation. The chapter concludes that empirical validation of self-report is always necessary to enhance the utility of collected self-report data and provide means of controlling for potential biases.

and intervention for a workshop titled “Measurement Issues for Family Prevention Intervention. ” This 2-day symposium was devoted to the

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This study investigates gender differences in adolescent drug use in terms of parental monitoring and peer deviance. Females are found to be more highly monitored than males, whereas males are more exposed to deviant peers than are females. There is a significant interaction between parental monitoring and peer deviance for the sample as a whole. The effect of this interaction is greater among females, indicating that exposure to deviant peers is more important for the drug use of females in families where parental monitoring is poor.

The authors thank Dan Zahs for his assistance with data analysis and Joyce Buchanan for her assistance with editing and manuscript This paper reports racial/ethnic differences in the use of licit and illicit drugs, using data from fourteen nationally representative surveys of high school seniors from 1976 through 1989. Throughout the period, Native Americans had the highest prevalence rates for use of illicit drugs except cocaine, for frequent use of alcohol, and for use of cigarettes; White students had the next highest prevalence rates for most drugs. Asian Americans had the lowest prevalence rates, and Black students had prevalence levels nearly as low, except for marijuana. Prevalence rates for the Hispanic groups were mostly in the intermediate ranges, except for a relatively high prevalence of cocaine use among the males. Trend patterns for most forms of drug use have been similar across subgroups, with two notable exceptions: (1) cocaine use increased somewhat more than average among Hispanic seniors and less than average among Black seniors, (2) the proportions smoking cigarettes have declined more sharply among Black than among White seniors, resulting in greater Black-White differences in recent years. Multivariate analyses indicate that subgroup differences in drug use cannot be attributed to background factors such as family