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.