Are High Schoolers Using Marijuana Instead of Alcohol/Cigarettes?
A look at 45 years of survey data among high school seniors
There are two things that I have realized over the last couple of months about a survey called Monitoring the Future.
It’s a tremendous data source if one wants to track the activity of high school students since 1976.
It’s a tremendous pain in the butt to actually analyze.
I don’t know how much the readers want to know about how the sausage is actually made when it comes to data analysis but there’s a maxim in my life: my likelihood of using a data source is more strongly correlated with the ease of analysis than it is with the insights that can be gleaned from the data. For Monitoring the Future, the only thing that keeps me coming back to wrestle with the data is how incredibly interesting the findings can be, especially about substance use.
Does Going to Church Keep High Schools from Drinking and Smoking?
I have become fond of saying to people that I got into this line of work to try and figure out what in the world happened to me when I was growing up. I was born in 1982 in a small town in Southern Illinois. My family - including my parents, and grandparents were incredibly active members of the largest Southern Baptist church in town. I was there a lot. It may be the one of the places I remember most as a young person. Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. Sometimes other days during the week to work on projects or plan events.
I wrote a post back in June that focused on the smoking habits and alcohol consumption of high school seniors using that Monitoring the Future data. A tweet that summarized some of those findings got a ton of traffic on Twitter, but the comments were pretty similar - marijuana has probably taken the place of smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol.
So, I wrote SEVEN HUNDRED lines of code to make five graphs. Which is a testament to how convoluted this dataset really is, but also allows me to show you how marijuana usage has changed since the mid-1970s.
The question is simple - have you used marijuana (or hashish) in the prior thirty days. There are ton of response options from never to more than 40 times. I just want you all to know that the biggest divide is between zero and one time. So, that’s what I am graphing below. The percentage of high school seniors who report using marijuana at least once in the prior month.
