Golub Andrew, Johnson Bruce D, Labouvie Erich
National Development and Research Associates, Inc., Two World Trade Center, 16th Floor, New York, New York 10048.
J Quant Criminol. 2000 Mar 1;16(1):45-68. doi: 10.1023/A:1007573411129.
Household survey data on age at first use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and hard drugs can be biased due to sample selection and inaccurate recall. One potential concern is attrition, whereby individuals who get involved with substance use at an early age become increasingly less likely to be surveyed in successive years. A comparison of data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) with data from a longitudinal study suggested that attrition might have caused substantially less bias than did "forward telescoping," the inflating of age at first use over time. The evidence of forward telescoping was particularly pronounced with respect to age at first use of alcohol. This paper presents a procedure for correcting the distribution of age at first use for forward telescoping (but not attrition) by viewing a portion of the NHSDA data collected in successive years as constituting a cohort study. Results are presented from applying this procedure with NHSDA data collected from 1982 to 1995 for respondents born 1968-1973. The findings suggest that prevention programs need to be introduced at an earlier age than would be indicated by "uncorrected" retrospective data. Other implications are also highlighted.
关于首次使用酒精、烟草、大麻和硬性毒品的年龄的家庭调查数据可能会因样本选择和回忆不准确而产生偏差。一个潜在的问题是损耗，即早年开始使用毒品的人在连续几年中接受调查的可能性越来越小。将全国药物滥用家庭调查（NHSDA）的数据与一项纵向研究的数据进行比较表明，损耗可能比“向前伸缩”（即首次使用年龄随时间推移而夸大）造成的偏差要小得多。向前伸缩的证据在首次使用酒精的年龄方面尤为明显。本文提出了一种程序，通过将连续几年收集的一部分NHSDA数据视为一项队列研究，来校正首次使用年龄分布中的向前伸缩（但不包括损耗）。文中展示了将该程序应用于1982年至1995年收集的、针对1968 - 1973年出生的受访者的NHSDA数据的结果。研究结果表明，预防项目需要在比“未校正”的回顾性数据所显示的年龄更早的时候引入。其他影响也得到了强调。
