SUMMARY

Monitoring the Future (MTF), sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is designed to elicit students' attitudes toward and experiences with drugs. The survey, which is given to between 14,000 and 18,000 high school seniors in 125 to 140 public and private schools, produces trends in drug use and attitudes in a nationally representative sample of high school seniors. Follow-up surveys also result in trends in use and attitudes in a nationally representative sample of young adults and college students. Monitoring the Future has been conducted every year since 1975 by researchers at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), University of Michigan. In 1991, the survey was expanded to include 8th and 10th graders.

SAMPLING

Sampling proceeds in three stages. Stage 1 selects geographical areas, primary sampling units (PSUs) that are used in other national projects of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (SRC). There are currently 108 PSUs, including the 28 largest metropolitan areas. Stage 2 selects one or more high schools in each area. Schools are selected with probability proportionate to the size of the senior class. In large metropolitan areas, two or more high schools may be selected. Stage 3 selects seniors within each high school. In larger schools, subsets of seniors are formed by randomly selecting classrooms. In schools with fewer than 350 seniors, all receive the survey.

Approximately 125 to 140 public and private high schools and approximately 14,000 to 18,000 students are selected in order to provide a representative sample of high school seniors throughout the U.S. In addition, recent samples included 17,000 to 19,000 8th graders from about 180 schools and 14,000 to 18,000 10th graders from about 130 to 140 schools. Between 50 and 70% of initially selected schools participate; SRC staff attempt to find substitutes that are similar to the schools that refuse participation. For recent senior surveys, the response rate has been in the low-to-mid 80% range, with most nonresponding students absent from school on the day of the survey. Response rates are higher for the 8th and 10th grades samples, as absenteeism is lower for those grades.

Schools generally agree to participate for 2 consecutive years, which allows the sample of schools to be designed so that each yearly sample contains about 65 schools that participated in the previous year's survey and about 65 schools that will participate in the next year's survey. This allows for a check of possible errors in the year-to-year trend estimates due to school turnover. For example, separate sets of 1-year trends were computed using the half-sample of schools that participated in both 1975 and 1976, then the half-sample that participated in both 1976 and 1977; this method has been repeated for subsequent years. When the resulting trend data are compared with trends based on the total sample of schools, the results are highly similar, indicating that the trend estimates are little affected by turnover or shifting refusal rates in the school samples.

Of the high school seniors surveyed each year, approximately 2,400 are chosen for annual followup surveys; this group is then randomly broken into two groups of approximately 1,200 each. One of these groups receives followup surveys in odd-numbered years, and the other in even-numbered years. The reason for creating two groups is to alleviate the burden of responding to annual questionnaires, and consequently to maximize the retention rate. After the 7th followup, survey frequency is reduced to once every 5 years.

INSTRUMENTATION

High school senior respondents are given one of six different questionnaires, which vary by the extent of questions about drug use and by the behaviors other than drug use that are probed. The questionnaires vary in length from 12 to 20 pages, but each is designed to be completed in 45 to 50 minutes. These six questionnaires are distributed to participants in an ordered sequence to ensure five virtually identical subsamples. All six questionnaires contain the core variables, including demographic and drug use variables. Eighth and tenth grade respondents receive one of two questionnaire variants, with more common material between them and fewer questions pertaining to topics other than drug use and demographics. Responses to all school-administered surveys are machine-tabulated.

KEY VARIABLES

Of particular interest to juvenile justice researchers are MTF questions about delinquent and deviant behaviors, such as theft and vandalism, assault, drunk driving, and carrying weapons to school, as well as victimization in incidents of theft, vandalism, and assault. MTF also attempts to assess "deviance proneness," self-esteem, locus of control, predilection toward risk-taking, and trust in others. It is important to note that questions other than the core drug and demographics questions are distributed among the six different question forms. An index showing what year and at what questionnaire location each question has appeared can be found in the ISR's Monitoring the Future: Questionnaire Responses from the Nation's High School Seniors (revised annually). For example, in the year 2000 survey, questions pertaining to school-based victimization or delinquency were asked of one set of students, and questions dealing with locus of control were asked of another set of students. However, all sets of students were asked the core questions dealing with drug use and demographics.

Background and demographic questions constitute another set of key variables. These include variables such as sex of respondent, college plans, region and population density of respondent homes, and family characteristics. Other key variables are attitude and belief measures: respondents are asked about their perception of the harmfulness of drugs, their (dis)approval of drug use, their attitudes about legalization of drug use, and their attitudes about marijuana laws in particular. These questions are augmented with questions about the attitudes of parents and friends toward drug use. Other key variables include questions about respondents' exposure to drug use and perception of the availability of drugs.

QUALITY CONTROLS

Across the life of the survey series the principal researchers have continually assessed the validity and reliability of their survey instruments. For a summary of such efforts, please see The Monitoring the Future Project After 27 Years: Design and Procedures (MTF Occassional Paper No. 54, J.G. Bachman, L.D. Johnston, and P.M. O’Malley [Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, 2001], available at http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/occpapers/occ54.pdf.

PERIODICITY

MTF surveys have been conducted annually since 1975 and are expected to continue annually.

REPRESENTATIVENESS

Estimates are generated that are representative of the coterminous U.S. high school senior, college student, and young adult populations. In 1991, eighth- and tenth-grader estimates were also added. All respondents in a school are assigned a weight to account for variations in sample sizes across schools.

DATA ACCESS

Data files from 1976 through 2001 are currently available from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/SAMHDA/.

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