Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth (12th-Grade Survey), 1995

This is the 21st annual survey in this series that explores
changes in important values, behaviors, and lifestyle orientations of
contemporary American youth. Two general types of tasks may be
distinguished. The first is to provide a systematic and accurate
description of the youth population of interest in a given year, and
to quantify the direction and rate of change occurring over time. The
second task, more analytic than descriptive, involves the explanation
of the relationships and trends observed. Each year, a large,
nationally representative sample of high school seniors in the United
States is asked to respond to approximately 100 drug-use and
demographic questions as well as to an average of 200 additional
questions on a variety of subjects, including attitudes toward
government, social institutions, race relations, changing roles for
women, educational aspirations, occupational aims, and marital and
family plans. The students are randomly assigned one of six
questionnaires, each with a different subset of topical questions but
all containing a set of "core" questions on demographics and drug
use. There are about 1,400 variables across the questionnaires.