Monitoring the Future

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is an ongoing study that measures longitudinal changes in the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of secondary school students, college students, and young adults in the United States. Since 1975, the study has been conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. With financial support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the study has addressed a range of topics related to substance use among young people. Substance use among youth is a rapidly changing phenomenon, and the study was designed to understand shifts in the patterns of drug and alcohol use among youth. The study also monitors attitudes toward drugs and alcohol held by this population as that data can be significant in mapping current and future substance use trends.

A core feature of MTF is an annual survey of the senior class for high schools in the United States, [Page 880]which began in 1975. In 1991, the school-based surveys were expanded to also include nationally representative samples of students in the eighth and 10th grades. The most recent MTF sample (2012) included about 45,400 students from grades eight, 10, or 12 in nearly 400 public or private schools. Schools are selected to provide an accurate, representative cross-section of high school students within the contiguous United States. Within each school, 350 students are randomly selected for participation. For schools with enrollment under this threshold, all students are included in the sample. Data are collected in the classroom using standardized procedures (e.g., closed-ended surveys administered by university staff). To track changes over time, follow-up surveys are mailed to a randomly selected subset of each graduating class for several years.

MTF data can be used to examine trends in the overall proportions of students at each grade level (1) using a particular drug, (2) seeing a great risk associated with its use, (3) disapproving of its use, and (4) saying They could get it fairly easily or very easily if They wanted to. Surveys contain questions on a range of substances including cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, inhalants, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine (powder and crack cocaine), heroin, other narcotics (e.g., codeine, Vicodin, or OxyContin), amphetamines (e.g., Ritalin, Adderall, or methamphetamine), sedatives (e.g., phenobarbital or Ambien), tranquilizers (e.g., Valium or Xanax), and other emerging drugs. More Recently, the survey has provided some of the earliest national estimates on the emerging use of other drugs such as synthetic marijuana (commonly referred to as Spice or K-2) and synthetic stimulants (bath salts). Since its inception, MTF has periodically addressed other topics relevant to youth, including delinquency and victimization, changing roles for women, confidence in social institutions, concerns about the environment, and general social and ethical attitudes.

The longitudinal nature of the data allows users to examine changes in substance-use trends related to age, time period, and birth cohort. Age effects relate behaviors to the particular developmental time period of the participant, while period effects include changes in particular years that show up consistently in all age groups. Cohort or birth group effects are lasting differences between different cohorts entering secondary school. Such cohort effects, for example, have been found for cigarette smoking throughout most of the MTF study. The follow-up data also allow researchers to examine how changes in substance use are linked to different environments (e.g., high school, college, or employment) and developmental transitions (e.g., leaving the parental home, marriage, or parenthood).

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