Measuring Substance Use and Misuse via Survey Research: Unfinished Business

Abstract

This article reviews unfinished business regarding the assessment of substance use behaviors by using survey research methodologies, a practice that dates back to the earliest years of this journal's publication. Six classes of unfinished business are considered including errors of sampling, coverage, non-response, measurement, processing, and ethics. It may be that there is more now that we do not know than when this work began some 50 years ago.

Keywords:

• substance use
• substance misuse
• survey research
• measurement quality

Notes

¹ The reader is referred to Hills's (1965) criteria for causation –a complex, dynamic, multidimensional, non-linear bounded (age, gender, ethnicity, religiosity, SEC, and a range of contexts and situations, among other considerations) process when regarding much if not most human behavior –which were developed in order to help assist researchers and clinicians determine whether "risk factors" were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated. Editor's note

² The reader is reminded that the concepts of “risk factors,” “vulnerabilities,” as well as “protective factors,” which can and are interpreted from “drug surveys” and are often noted in the literature, without adequately noting their dimensions (linear, non-linear; rates of development and decay; anchoring or integration, cessation, etc), their “demands,” the critical necessary conditions (endogenously as well as exogenously; from a micro to a meso to a macro level) that are necessary for either of them to operate (begin, continue, become anchored and integrate, change as de facto realities change, cease, etc.), or not to and whether their underpinnings are theory-driven, empirically based, individual and/or systemic stake holder-bound, based upon “principles of faith doctrinaire positions, “personal truths,” historical observation, precedents and traditions that accumulate over time, conventional wisdom, perceptual and judgmental constraints, “transient public opinion,” or others. This is necessary to consider and to clarify if these term are not to remain as yet additional shibboleth in a field of many stereotypes, tradition-driven activities, “principles of faith,” and stakeholder objectives. Editor's note.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy P. Johnson

Timothy P. Johnson, PhD, is a member of the Editorial Board of Substance Use & Misuse. He also serves as Director of the Survey Research Laboratory, Professor of Public Administration, and Vice Chair of the Social and Behavioral Institutional Review Board at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His research interests include the social epidemiology of health behavior and cultural sources of measurement error in the social sciences. Johnson earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Kentucky in 1988.