Newsbrief:
New
Research
Suggests
Student
Drug
Use
Surveys
Miss
the
Mark
2/18/05
A review of three decades of Monitoring the Future (MTF) and Parents Resource Institute on Drug Education (PRIDE) youth drug use surveys by University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males strongly suggests that such surveys are not an efficacious measure of student well-being. Males found that not only are MTF and PRIDE subject to the inaccuracies that afflict all self-reporting surveys, but also that the behavior they measure, student drug use, does not reflect broader measures of generational well-being -- making the surveys a poor guide for setting policy. In fact, Males reported in the Journal of School Health, despite the obsessive concern with annual fluctuations in self-reported student drug use by drug fighters and reformers alike, classes reporting lower levels of drug use showed higher levels of other undesirable behaviors than those classes with higher levels of reported drug use. "Compared to students in classes that report low drug use rates, students in classes that report high rates were significantly less likely to report having been in a serious fight, injuring someone seriously, having frequent fights with parents, being in a gang fight, stealing a car, committing armed robbery, committing arson, or being victimized by a major or minor theft at school," Males noted. Males characterized his findings as "striking and unexpected," with serious implications for the setting of drug policy in this country. "Are students, then, better off when they use more drugs?" he asked. "The question addressed here was not whether drug use is good or bad for students, but whether drug use as measured on self-reporting surveys provides a valid indicator of student well-being and thus a viable basis for policy." For Males, the answer is clearly not. While the surveys are often the "sole means by which drug education policies and programs are evaluated," they not only provide misleading data about the overall welfare of those being surveyed but they also "obscure the fact that higher rates of drug use are connected to student well-being in ways not yet understood," he wrote. Furthermore, "over-reliance on surveys promotes increasingly intrusive efforts to stop all student drug use, and this tend may be counterproductive" given the findings of increased well-being in classes that had higher levels of self-reported drug use. "In any case," Males concluded, "the conclusion is the same: policy makers, school administrators, substance abuse programs, and the news media attach too much importance to surveys. Students in the years in which 40% reported using drugs were no worse off, and often significantly better off by most important measures, than were students in years when 15% report using drugs. Thus, do policies that focus primarily on reducing numbers on self-report surveys best serve school health objectives?"
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