NCJ Number
197982
Journal
Journal of Offender Rehabilitation Volume: 35 Issue: 2 Dated: 2002 Pages: 51-62
Date Published
2002
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This article examines the consistency in assessments of lifetime self-reported drug and alcohol use by incarcerated adolescents.
Abstract
Identifying methods of encouraging accurate self-report information is essential if the results of studies on drug abuse are to be meaningful. The incarcerated adolescents’ reported use of various substances, such as marijuana, cocaine, injection drugs, and heroin/opiates is compared within a 6-week period under two different interview conditions. One type of interview is by the staff of the State juvenile correctional system in which the adolescent is incarcerated. The second type of interview is with independent, external researchers that are conducting a study in which they are collecting data from interviewing the incarcerated adolescents. In a 3-year period, 1,008 youths were interviewed by both medical staff and psychologists employed by the State’s juvenile correctional facilities and by university-affiliated researchers. Results show that incarcerated adolescents are more likely to report the lifetime use of drugs and alcohol when they are interviewed by external, independent researchers than when they are interviewed by State correctional staff for the same information. Fewer than half of these youths gave the same report of lifetime use of all six substances when interviewed by the researchers and the State correctional staff within a 6-week period. It is unlikely that these differences are due to forgetting because the time elapsing between the two interviews is relatively short. Further investigation is needed to explore issues underlying inconsistency in responses, such as an investigation of incarcerated adolescents’ views about the confidentiality of the data that they provide about use of drugs and alcohol. 3 tables, 23 references