DOI: 10.3886/icpsr02175.v1
title: ABC News/Washington Post Drug Poll, February 1997
title: Version 1

description: This special topic poll, conducted February 20-24, 1997, solicited responses from parents and their teenage children, aged 12-17, on the topic of illegal drug use among America's youth. One parent and one child from each household were asked a series of questions covering illegal drugs, violence in school, underage drinking, academic challenges, and parent-child communication. Respondents were asked to assess their understanding of the presence of drugs and drug users in their local schools, throughout the community, across the nation, among the teen's peer group, and within their own family. A series of topics covered the availability and effectiveness of school-sponsored anti-drug programs. Parents were asked how their possible past and present use and/or experimentation with marijuana and other illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco products influenced the manner in which they approached drug use with their own children. Teenage respondents were asked for their reaction to the use of drugs and alcohol by their friends, the seriousness of the contemporary drug problem, and whether they believed that their parents had used or experimented with illegal drugs. Other questions asked about teenage respondents' plans after high school and whether they attended a public or private school. Demographic variables for parental respondents included age, race, sex, education level, household income, political party affiliation, and type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural). Demographic variables for teenage respondents included age, race, sex, residential area, and grade level in school.
description: The data contain a weight variable (WEIGHT) that should be used in analyzing the data. This poll consists of "standard" national representative samples of the adult population with sample balancing of sex, race, age, and education. The weight variable contains two implied decimal places, and applies only to the parental respondents.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created online analysis version with question text..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: ABC News/Washington Post Drug Poll, February 1997, Dataset 0001
description: ABC News/Washington Post Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
 (1) The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis. (2) Original reports using these data may be found via the ABC News Web site. (3) According to the data collection instrument, code 3 in the variable P_EDUC also included respondents who answered that they had attended a technical college. (4) The CASEID variable was created for use with online analysis.
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with telephones in the contiguous 48 United States.
description: Households were selected by random-digit dialing. Within households, the respondent selected was the adult living in the household who last had a birthday and who was home at the time of the interview.