DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04099
title: National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), 2003
title: Archival Version

description: The National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS) is designed to collect information from all facilities in the United States, both public and private, that provide substance abuse treatment. N-SSATS provides the mechanism for quantifying the dynamic character and composition of the United States substance abuse treatment delivery system. The objectives of N-SSATS are to collect multipurpose data that can be used to assist the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and state and local governments in assessing the nature and extent of services provided and in forecasting treatment resource requirements, update SAMHSA's Inventory of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (I-SATS), analyze general treatment services trends, and generate the National Directory of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Treatment Programs and its online equivalent, the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator.
Data are collected on topics including facility operation, services offered (assessment, substance abuse therapy and counseling, pharmacotherapies, testing, transitional, ancillary), primary focus (substance abuse, mental health, both, general health, other), hotline operation, Opioid Treatment Programs and medication dispensed, languages in which treatment is provided, type of treatment provided, number of clients (total and under age 18), number of beds, types of payment accepted, sliding fee scale, special programs offered, facility accreditation and licensure/certification, and managed care agreements.
description: Response Rates: N-SSATS questionnaires were mailed to a total of
17,787 facilities believed to offer substance abuse treatment
services. Of these facilities, 15 percent were found to be ineligible
for the survey because they had closed, were not providing substance
abuse treatment on March 31, 2003, or treated incarcerated clients
only. Of the remaining 15,124 facilities, 95.9 percent (14,503)
completed the survey. However, 880 of these facilities were deemed to
be out-of-scope or had client counts reported by another facility but
no facility information. Therefore, the final sample size was 13,623
(90 percent). Forty-nine percent of respondents completed the mail
survey, 24 percent completed the survey via telephone, and 27 percent
completed the survey using a Web-based questionnaire.
description: The Inventory of Substance Abuse Treatment Services
(I-SATS) provides the sampling frame for N-SSATS. Two categories of
treatment facilities in I-SATS may be distinguished. The largest group
of facilities includes those that are licensed, certified, or
otherwise approved by the state substance abuse agency to provide
substance abuse treatment. The second group represents the SAMHSA
effort in recent years to make I-SATS as comprehensive as possible by
including treatment facilities that state substance abuse agencies,
for a variety of reasons, do not license or certify. Many of these
facilities are private for-profit, small group practices, or
hospital-based programs.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), 2003
description: mail questionnaire; telephone interview; web-based surveyData were collected by Mathematica Policy
Research, Inc., Princeton, NJ, and prepared for release by Synectics
for Management Decisions, Inc., Arlington, VA.N-SSATS is a
point-prevalence survey. It provides information on the substance
abuse treatment system and its clients on the reference date. Client
counts do not represent annual totals. Rather, N-SSATS provides a
"snapshot" of substance abuse treatment facilities and clients on an
average day.N-SSATS collects data about facilities, not
individual clients. Data on clients represent an aggregate of clients
in treatment for each reporting facility.N-SSATS attempts to
obtain responses from all known treatment and prevention facilities,
but it is a voluntary survey. There is no adjustment for facility
nonresponse.To protect the privacy of respondents, financial data
originally collected have been removed from the public use file.
These modifications should not affect most analytic uses of the public
use file.For users who wish to calculate client counts and admissions, instructions are available on the N-SSATS Series page and at How to calculate N-SSATS client counts and admissions using SDA.