Attachment Files

PDF | Monitoring the Future - National Results on Adolescent Drug Use - 2010

Summary/Abstract

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term study of American adolescents, college students, and adults through age 50. It has been conducted annually by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research since its inception in 1975.

Content

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term study of American adolescents, college students, and adults through age 50. It has been conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research since its inception in 1975 and is supported under a series of investigator-initiated, competing research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The need for a study such as MTF is clear. Substance use by American young people has proven to be a rapidly changing phenomenon, requiring frequent assessments and reassessments. Since the mid-1960s,when it burgeoned in the general youth population, illicit drug use has remained a major concern for the nation. Smoking, drinking, and illicit drug use are leading causes of morbidity and mortality, both during adolescence as well as later in life. How vigorously the nation responds to teenage substance use, how accurately it identifies the emerging substance abuse problems, and how well it comes to understand the effectiveness of policy and intervention efforts largely depend on the ongoing collection of valid and reliable data. Monitoring the Future is designed to generate such data in order to provide an accurate picture of what is happening in this domain and why, and has served that function well for the past 35 years. Policy discussions in the media, in government, education, public health institutions, and elsewhere have been informed by the ready availability of extensive and consistently accurate information from the study relating to a large number of substances. The 2010 MTF survey encompassed about 46,500 eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students in almost 400 secondary schools nationwide. The first published results are presented in this report. Recent trends in the use of licit and illicit drugs are emphasized, as well as trends in the levels of perceived risk and personal disapproval associated with each drug. This study has shown these beliefs and attitudes to be particularly important in explaining trends in use. In addition, trends in the perceived availability of each drug are presented. A synopsis of the design and methods used in the study and an overview of the key results from the 2010 survey follow this introductory section. These are followed by a separate section for each individual drug class, providing figures that show trends in the overall proportions of students at each grade level (a) using the drug, (b) seeing a “great risk” associated with its use (perceived risk), (c) disapproving of its use (disapproval), and (d) saying they could get it “fairly easily” or “very easily” if they wanted to (perceived availability). For 12th graders, annual data are available since 1975, and for 8th and 10th graders, since 1991, the first year they were included in the study. The tables at the end of this report provide the statistics underlying the figures; in addition, they present data on lifetime, annual, 30-day, and (for selected drugs) daily prevalence.1 For the sake of brevity, we present these prevalence statistics here only for the 1991–2010 interval, but statistics on 12th graders are available for earlier years in other MTF publications. For each prevalence period, the tables indicate which of the most recent one-year changes (between 2009 and 2010) are statistically significant. The graphic depictions of multiyear trends often indicate gradual, continuing change that may not reach significance in a given one-year interval. A much more extensive analysis of the study's findings on secondary school students may be found in Volume I, the second monograph in this series,which will be published later in 2011.2 Volume I contains a more complete description of the study's methodology, as well as an appendix explaining how to test the significance of differences between groups and of trends over time. The most recent such volumeis always available on the MTF Web site, ========================= SEE ATTACHED PDF ABOVE FOR FULL STUDY