DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04099.v3
title: National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), 2003
title: Version 3

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: 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: Performed consistency checks.; Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Standardized missing values.; Created online analysis version with question text.; Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
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: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), 2003
description: National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS) Series
description: mail questionnaire, telephone interview, web-based survey 
Data 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.
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.