Drug survey accuracy challenged

I applaud the new public service announcements dealing with alcohol abuse announced last month by Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe’s office. People need good information about the damage, both physically and legally, that can result from alcohol abuse or underage drinking.

The hard data cited [in a Dec. 6, 2005, BDN story] – OUI arrests, alcohol-related accidents, emergency room reports, the costs of “substance abuse treatment, lost productivity, illness, injury and death” – appear to justify the state’s concern.

What should not be driving public policy, however, are the results from the Maine Youth Drug and Alcohol Use Survey referenced in the news report.

As a nontraditional University of Maine student topping off a long-delayed degree in 1997, I investigated and analyzed four such statewide student surveys for a journalism class. Participants in those surveys had been promised anonymity, with researchers presuming that any and all responses would therefore be totally accurate and honest.

What I found was astonishing, not only in how the students answered, but in how the raw data was handled and in how little filtering was done to find and weed out questions answered dishonestly – particularly, it would appear, by adolescent boys.

My report, which has been available on the Internet for eight years, begins this way:

“The statistics are used to justify prevention and containment efforts, from the D.A.R.E. program in schools to the national ‘war on drugs.’ But do these statistics represent reality? How far should we go in trusting students to honestly self-report their own illegal, anti-social, and-or undesirable behaviors, many of which, if traced back to them, could land them in juvenile court? More importantly, can we trust researchers to tell us what their research showed?

An in-depth review of the four survey reports, plus an interview with the lead researcher for the three most recent polls, has turned up a number of inconsistencies, which challenge the veracity of those reports. Among the problems uncovered were:

. Inclusion of hundreds of surveys that a previous researcher had routinely excluded as tainted, resulting in artificially spiked statistics.

. Significant results overlooked, ignored, downplayed, or deliberately left unreported.

. High levels of provably unreliable responses by students.

. Deliberately vague survey questions, along with inadequate options for answers.

. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of answers to three specific questions intentionally left unrecorded, even in raw data.

. Questionable and-or biased sampling methods, resulting in some student surveys being counted four times.

Unless the survey techniques have been vastly improved in the past eight years, I would hold all results in more recent surveys to be equally suspect.”

The BDN article also pointed to a large disparity between what the surveyed students said they were doing and what their parents, in a separate survey, thought they were doing. The implication was that parents don’t have a clue what illegal shenanigans their darlings are up to when they are not around.

But let’s use some common sense here. That second survey had parents being interviewed by telephone, talking to survey-takers who obviously knew their phone numbers and therefore knew who they were talking to or could easily find out.

I suspect that parents are, on the whole, aware of what their kids are up to. But in this era of the Patriot Act, they’re not going to provide damaging details to a stranger who calls them on the phone in what could well be, for all they know, a police fishing expedition.

I called Attorney General Rowe shortly after that article appeared, and expressed my concern about the use of the student drug survey data. I was reassured when he told me that actual police and hospital data were the primary incentives for developing the new radio ads.

I support the state’s efforts to provide useful information to both minors and adults on the issue of alcohol abuse and the problem of underage drinking, and I look forward to hearing those ads in the coming weeks.

Former BDN reporter and Hancock County bureau chief Jean Hay Bright now lives in Dixmont. She is a 1998 UMaine graduate and is a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Her full drug survey report can be found online at http://www.jeanhay.com/EXPOSE/DRUGME.HTM.

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