JPSM MPSDS Seminar
October 19, 2022
How to Draw a Nationally-Representative Sample: Updating and Reassessing Monitoring the Future's Sampling Procedures
Professor Richard Miech is Principal Investigator
of Monitoring the Future, which since 1975 has drawn annual,
nationally-representative samples of adolescents and tracked trends in
adolescent drug use. His work focuses on trends in substance use,
with an emphasis on disentangling how these trends vary by age, historical
period, and birth cohort membership.
The national estimates
of drug use from Monitoring the Future (MTF) serve as a gold standard in the
field and are a key source of information for research, U.S. policymakers,
and nonprofit organizations that seek to reduce teen drug use. For
sample selection MTF uses a multistage, random sampling procedure that
consists of (1) selection of a specific geographic areas, (2) selection of one
or more high schools in each area, and (3) selection of students within each
school. MTF has recently begun a revisit and overhaul of its sampling
procedures, which were developed more than three decades ago. In this
talk Professor Miech discusses this overhaul, including sampling challenges and
issues that have arisen over the years, as well as opportunities to streamline
and improve MTF sampling with new technology.