I need you to write a 6 page paper ( the first page need to be 200 word abstract and then there needs to be a 5 page literature review, which you have to compare and contrast all the dataand sources

The top five queried drugs were marijuana (16.4%), alcohol (8.5%), tobacco (6%), cocaine (5.7), and pharmaceutical drugs (4.5%). The effects of drug use, experience of being high, the addictiveness of drugs, pharmacology, and drug sales were among the more common types of questions to emerge but varied depending on the substance. These findings show the types of information young people are seek- ing about drugs and have clear implications to inform youth drug education programs.

Keywords adolescent attitudes, drug abuse, information dissemination Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 2015, Vol. 45(3-4) 195–210 !The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0047237915622084 dre.sagepub.com 1Department of Social Work, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA2School of Liberal Arts, Berkeley College, New York, NY, USA3The Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, New York, NY, USA4Higher Education Division, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA5Public Health Solutions, New York, NY, USA Corresponding Author:

Cory M. Morton, Department of Social Work, University of New Hampshire, 55 College Road, 119B Pettee Hall, Durham, NH 03824, USA.

Email: [email protected] Introduction Since 2007, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has sponsored Drug Facts Chat Day, an event that allows high school students to pose questions to experts in the field of substance abuse and addiction (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2015b). In 2010, NIDA launched National Drug Facts Week (NDFW) as a way to counteract the myths surrounding substance abuse and addiction by facilitating community and school events across the United States to educate youth on the science of how drugs affect the brain, body, and behavior. “Chat Day” has been an integral part of National Drug Facts Week, providing an opportunity for youth to directly connect with drug abuse professionals in a full-day online event. During the 10-hr session, youth in participating schools pose questions anonymously through a web interface and have their questions answered by NIDA scientists. The present study is a content analysis of a large sample of their questions, which were codified and analyzed to shed light on thedrug-related thoughts, curiosities, and misperceptions of adolescents. Understanding what adolescents want to know about drugs may suggest new directions for youth health interventions, education, and programming.

There is increasing recognition of the need for young people to be given the opportunity to share ideas, feelings, and questions about drug-related issues that affect them, and that they are social actors in their own right who possess unique competencies that are different, but no less valid than those of adults (Claveirole, 2004; Coyne, 1998; James & Prout, 1997; Morrow & Richards, 1996). Paying attention to the way young people voice their concerns and questions is an essential component of research ethics, and accounting for knowledge of their world and argot can significantly affect the efficacy of interventions (Claveirole, 2004; Coyne, 1998; Greig & Taylor, 1999). Research questions identified from these types of ground-up user-generated queries reflect contemporary issues of concern, which are useful to substance abuse researchers in particular because adolescent drug use trends are especially prone to change over time (Aikins, 2014; Botvin, 2000; Johnston, O’Malley, Miech, Bachman, & Schulenberg, 2014). Specifically, noting the types of drugs and concerns that youth have about them is a practical step toward identifying what information could use- fully be disseminated to both teens and adults. This article analyzes the ques- tions teens had about drugs and alcohol and related issues. For these reasons, the following review of the literature relates mostly to how adolescents receive information about drugs, and what they do and do not know about drugs.

NIDA has long established that the beliefs and attitudes held by adolescents about drugs are important when explaining trends in adolescent drug use (Johnston et al., 2014). Adolescents have curiosity about drugs and currently are especially curious about drug policy issues surrounding recreational and medicinal marijuana (D’Amico, Miles, & Tucker, 2015), as well as smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes, among other recent trends (Ahern & Mechling, 2014; 196Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 45(3-4) Portnoy, Wu, Tworek, Chen, & Borek, 2014). Young people often turn to sources for information on substance use that may or may not be reliable or evidence-based. Common sources of information include parents (Stoelben, Krappweis, Rossler, & Kirch, 2000), television (Strasburger, 1990), the internet (Belenko et al., 2009; Gray, Klein, Noyce, Sesselberg, & Cantrill, 2005; Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010), peers (Boyer, Shannon, & Hibberd, 2005), and in-school drug education and drug abuse prevention programs such as DARE—which were found to be less effective among youth due to the perceived condescension of its tone and presentation of irrelevant or dated information (Botvin, 2000).

Misinformation is a problem. Studies have found that the information ado- lescents access about drug effects and abuse is often incorrect (Ames, Sussman, & Dent, 1999; Belenko et al., 2009), and misconceptions about drugs can lead to increased usage by adolescents (D’Amico et al., 2015). In particular, Ames et al.

(1999) found that obtaining incorrect information about drug effects led ado- lescents to try drugs they otherwise might not have. In addition, the majority of teens gather information about drugs from search engines, such as Google, which then direct them to forums and websites that are not monitored for the accuracy of their information. The consensus from the above literature is that it is a persistent public-health need to know what adolescents do and do not know about drugs, which is one aim propelling this article.

During Chat Day, youth build their knowledge about drugs by interacting directly with NIDA drug experts and researchers. This is in contrast to other approaches, such as the “NIDA for Teens” website (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2015b), which provides youth-oriented information about drugs aimed toward general consumers, parents, teachers, and adolescents. Interacting dir- ectly with NIDA Chat Day experts is important because it captures large fre- quencies of unanticipated questions, and students receive answers tailored directly to their concerns. Our study focuses on the questions asked by students, using the Chat Day data to examine specific youth drug information needs.

These data may help illuminate possible youth-drug education and program- ming needs. For example, while the NIDA for Teens section on “Real Questions from Real Teens” addresses a broad range of issues about addiction and pre- vention, it does not directly address concerns such as how to deal with family and friends who may either influence them to use drugs or who they want to help stop using, the experience of being high, how it might be safe(r) to experiment with drugs, or the benefits of using some drugs medically (e.g., to enhance sexual pleasure)—questions our forthcoming analyses suggest are common.

Since Chat Day began in 2007, students from across the country have posed nearly 70,000 questions to NIDA. Yet to date, these data have not been systematically analyzed. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to provide a content analysis of the types of questions young people ask about drugs.

More specifically, this article categorizes students’ questions in terms of the Morton et al.197 types of substances and topics queried (e.g., effects of drugs, prevention, recov- ery). The authors also assessed whether the topics of interest varied by type of drug and analyzed whether the type of drug asked about changed over time.

This article describes the questions students asked drug experts by providing the percent of questions pertaining to various types of drugs and topics of interest.

Methods Data for this analysis come from transcripts of 67,051 questions asked by stu- dents from hundreds of middle and high schools across the country in 6 years of Chat Day sessions from 2007 to 2011 and 2013 (NIDA did not conduct a Chat Day in 2012). A general inductive approach to the qualitative analysis was employed in the development of the coding scheme detailed later (Thomas, 2006). Textual analysis was used to determine the frequency of the specific drug types youth asked about, and a content analysis was performed on a random sample of questions to gain insight into the kinds of concerns youth had about drugs.

Code Development First, a coding scheme was developed to be applied in the identification of drug types and the main concern posed in the questions. The scheme was developed, and questions were coded, by 16 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as part of their training in the NIDA-funded Behavioral Science Training in Drug Abuse Research program (which is housed at National Development and Research Institutes, Inc.). Over a series of weekly meetings lasting approxi- mately 2 months, the group developed and refined the coding scheme on a set of 1,451 questions. For drug type, substances were essentially classified accord- ing to on NIDA’s list of drugs of abuse (NIDA, 2015a). This list was modified in a few ways. Hallucinogens and salvia were merged into one category: psyche- delics. We also added three categories to the list due to their occurrence in the questions during Chat Day: caffeine, any drug, and other drug. Questions that only mentioned drugs generically were placed in the “any drug” category.

Questions about drugs that did not fit into any existing category (e.g., kitty litter) were classified as “other drugs.” The group then used this list to aid in the classification of slang and alternate terms for drugs of abuse (e.g., the mari- juana category contained mentions of “marijuana,” “pot,” “weed,” “Mary Jane,” and so forth, and the alcohol category included mentions of “beer,” “hooch,” and “booze”), and questions were analyzed until no new drug names appeared in the data. Table 1 lists the 17 drug categories identified in this process.

198Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 45(3-4) Second, the group developed a coding scheme for the content of questions where emergent themes were identified until saturation was achieved. The final set of codes reflected eight domains: reasons for using drugs, general drug infor- mation (e.g., pharmacology, the experience of being high, causes of addiction), effects of drug use, prevention, quitting, legal issues, environment or epidemi- ology of drug use, and “other” (i.e., questions that did not fit in the previous categories). The codes developed in the above were then applied to determine their relative frequency in the data during the content analysis described later. Textual Analysis Using the list of drug types discussed earlier, Wordstat 6 (WordStat (Version 6), 2005) was used to count the frequency of each mention of a particular drug type for the full set of 67,051 questions. The data were used to describe the overall frequency of mentions of drug types and if there were any trends over time. After obtaining the frequency of each drug category, percentages were calculated using the number of questions as the denominator. Since questions often contained mentions of several substances—and some questions were not about any drugs Table 1.Substances Mentioned in Chat Day Questions.

All questions (N¼67,051) Drug type PercentN Any drug 44.3 28,928 Marijuana 16.4 10,697 Alcohol 8.5 5,572 Tobacco 6.0 3,905 Cocaine 5.7 3,728 Pharmaceutical drugs 4.5 2,912 Methamphetamine 3.6 2,357 Psychedelics 2.4 1,556 Steroids 2.1 1,362 Heroin 1.4 906 Inhalants 1.3 837 MDMA or Ecstasy 1.2 813 PCP .7 425 Caffeine .6 398 Other drugs .6 419 Bath salts .4 287 Synthetic marijuana .2 126 Morton et al.199 at all (e.g., “What’s your name?,” “y is this takin so long?”)—the percentages obtained do not add up to 100.

Content Analysis The coding scheme developed above was applied to a random sample of ques- tions from each year of Chat Day. Sample selection proceeded in two main steps. In the 2007 inaugural year of Chat Day, NIDA did not require schools to register before the event and participation was very high. Of the 67,051 unique questions asked from 2007 to 2013, 34,910 (52%) were asked in 2007 alone. A 25% random sample was selected from the 2007 questions to bring the number of questions asked the first year in line with the other years (which averaged about 6,428 questions). Then, an approximately 20% random sample of ques- tions was selected from each year for the content analysis. The final sample comprises 6,098 questions.

Eight pairs of coders analyzed the sample questions according to two main criteria: drug type and theme or domain of the question. While drug type was identified via the textual analysis with Wordstat, it was coded in the sample questions to investigate whether differences existed in terms of question content by drug type as well as to compare against the results obtained in the textual analysis.

Interrater reliability was calculated using Cohen’s kappa (i) and was deter- mined to be .90 (almost perfect agreement) for drug type and .76 (substantial agreement) for domain (Landis & Koch, 1977). Coding discrepancies were dis- cussed as a group and consensus among and between pairs of coders was ultim- ately reached for 5,577 (91.4%) of the questions.

Results Substances Mentioned in Chat Day Questions Table 1 presents the overall frequencies of the substances mentioned in youths’ questions during the Chat Day sessions based on the textual analysis. The five most frequently mentioned substances in order were marijuana, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, and pharmaceutical drugs. Although marijuana was men- tioned most frequently each year from 2007 to 2013, there were some fluctu- ations in mentions of the other drugs, as depicted in Figure 1. While tobacco was the second most frequently mentioned substance in 2007 and 2008, alcohol was for the remaining years. Cocaine and prescription or over the counter drugs were relatively close most years with the exception of 2010 when there was a spike in the mentions of pharmaceutical drugs.

The percentage change from the lowest to highest point from 2007 and 2013 was calculated for each drug mentioned in the questions. Alcohol experienced 200Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 45(3-4) the greatest increase (67%), followed by marijuana (65%), pharmaceutical drugs (23%), and tobacco (16%). Questions about cocaine declined by 9%.

Although not depicted in Figure 1, interest in bath salts (i.e., synthetic cathi- nones), which was low for most years (<0.1% of total queries from 2007 to 2011), increased in 2013 to 2.7% of questions.

Topics Youth Asked About in Chat Day Questions Table 2 shows the percentage of questions that fell into each of the main domains for all years combined as well as each domain’s definition and examples of questions submitted. In the presentation of results, quotes from the Chat Day transcripts are presented verbatim. Questions most frequently concerned the short- and long-term effects of drug use (33.5%). Examples include “Does ecstasy really put a pencil sized whole in your brain every time you do it?” “How long does it take you to have lung cancer if you do smoke?” These were followed by questions about general drug information (30.2%), which was something of a catchall category that include topics like the addictiveness of drugs, the experience of being high, the pharmacology of drugs, where to buy drugs. Questions included the following: “Is heroin the most dangerous drug out their?,” “What are typical hallucinations when you take meth?” Youth asked the Figure 1.Top 5 drugs mentioned in Chat Day questions by year.

Morton et al.201 Table 2.Topics Youth Asked About During Chat Day. 1 Topic Domain (definition) % Examples of Domain Questions Effects (short- and long-term effects of drug use, how drugs affect the brain, body, and physical health, how drugs affect mental health, the behavioral and social effects of drugs, drugs use and pregnancy, drug use and sex, drug use and academic or sports performance)33.5 What are the long-term effects of marijuana use?

Do shrooms make your brain bleed and lose memory?

How fast would it take to get gums dis- ease if you chewed tobacco?

Is it true that ecstasy pills can kill a pregnant woman’s child?

Does taking drugs make sex more enjoyable?

Does marijuana affect your ability to drive a car?

General Drug Information (concerns about drug use, the experience of being high, what causes addiction, how drugs are administered, pharmacology, drug sales and acquisition)30.2 How do you know if somebody is high?

What is worse shooting up or snort- ing?

Since people smoke bath salts, can they smoke chlorine from pools too?

What is the difference between cocaine and crack?

Environment (epidemiological data on drug use and drug-related harms, his- torical background of drugs)8.1 How many people die by drunk driving aday?

What is the most popular drug?

Reasons for using (motivations for initi- ating drug use, biological causes of drug use, curiosity about experiment- ing with drugs)5.5 What makes people turn to drug?

Is it more likely for kids with alcoholic parents to become alcoholics when they get older?

Legal issues (criminal justice issues related to drug use or possession, legality of drugs, medical marijuana)5.6 What is the jail sentence if you are caught with possession?

Why are some drugs illegal while others are not?

Is there a difference between medical marijuana and illegal marijuana?

Quitting (how to quit personal drug use, how to help friend or relative quit drug use, recovery process, treatment options for drug abuse)3.9 I love pot, what can I do to stop?

My friend is addicted to meth how can I help him get off?

What are the side effects after an addict quits heroin?

What kind of medications are out there that can help you stop abusing drugs?

Are there any types of drugs that are impossible to quit?

Prevention (how to avoid drug use, information on formal school- or com- munity-based prevention programs)0.7 I[t] seems like everyone around me does some type of drugs. How do I get away from it?

Do you think if you stop telling people about drugs they won’t use them?

202Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 45(3-4) least number of questions about how to avoid drug use (less than 1% of ques- tions were about prevention).

Cross-tabulating each type of drug by the various domains produced fairly similar results. For the five most frequently asked about drugs as well as the any drug category, students inquired mainly about drug effects (ranging from 30.9% to 43.5% of questions for the various drug types) and general drug information (ranging from 23.5% to 31.8%). The differences between these two domains for most of these questions were small (ranging from 0.8% to 4.2%), except for the alcohol and tobacco questions where 41.7% and 43.5% of students asked about effects, respectively, but only 30.9% and 23.5% asked for general drug informa- tion. For cocaine and pharmaceuticals, the percentage of questions about effects and general drug information combined (about 83% for each drug) was consid- erably higher than for the other drug categories (which ranged from 59.3% to 72.6%) where students’ questions were spread out proportionately more over the other domains. For example, when it came to marijuana, more students were concerned (17.3%) about legal issues (e.g., “What made marijuana become an illegal drug in so many states?”) than was the case for other drugs.

Discussion The quantitative analysis of Chat Day questions produced several key findings about the questions teenagers have about drugs. While the top five drugs asked about were marijuana (16.4%), alcohol (8.5%), tobacco (6%), cocaine (5.7), and pharmaceutical drugs (4.5%), students mainly asked about drugs in general (44.3%). Although about twice as many students asked questions about mari- juana than alcohol, alcohol ranked higher in terms of lifetime and annual use among 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students during each year Chat Day was con- ducted (Johnston et al., 2014). Some questions reflected the emergence of new drugs or changing trends in drug use, such as those about salvia, synthetic marijuana, bath salts, and caffeinated beverages. While teenagers were con- cerned mainly about the effects of drugs (33.5%) and general drug information (30.5%), few were concerned about prevention or avoiding drug use.

In the realm of “drug effects,” students tended to ask many questions about the effects of drugs on the body and physical health (e.g., “what happens when u take drugs?” or “where do drugs affect the most in the human body?”).

Furthermore, students wanted to know about both positive effects and negative drug effects (e.g., “how do drugs help you relax?” and “does marijuana cure arthritis”). Moreover, many effects questions were worded neutrally (e.g., How does smoking pot effect sex?). This presented a methodological coding challenge for the research team whereby questions about “drug effects” were originally categorized into negative effects versus neutral or positive effects. After begin- ning the analysis, however, the “neutral” designation proved problematic across coding pairs for some of the broader or more ambiguous questions.

Morton et al.203 For example, the question “what are the long-term effects of drug use?” is osten- sibly neutral, whereas concerns over long-term drug effects were generally con- sidered more negative than positive. Such ambiguity led to concerns about the internal validity of the two different effects codes, which were thus combined into one category to eliminate the possibility of misclassification. Although the combined category makes sense intuitively (all of the questions are still about effects), the research team lamented the loss of this useful granularity concerning questions about positive effects and felt it important to note that the effects category includes positive and unspecified effects as well as negative ones.

Another common theme that cut across multiple domains was the concern students had about drug use among their family and friends. Common issues included having a friend who used alcohol or drugs and concerns over how to approach him or her, whereas other concerns involved how to prevent drug use initiation among peers. For example, one student asked: “What would you say to someone you know that is addicted to drugs without hurting the relationship you have with them?” Another asked: “What do you suggest as the best pre- vention strategy for kids born into families who abuse substances?” which per- tained to prevention. And lastly: “How can I get my father to stop smoking, chewing, drinking?” pertained to quitting. These questions were assigned to three domains, respectively: drug use, prevention, and quitting. The nature of these questions, however, points to an intervention need that goes beyond tech- nical coding issues or the ability of a remote NDIA expert to provide informa- tion, and the concern expressed by many students for the well-being of others was especially heartening.

Another important issue involved problem severity. From a quantitative per- spective, drug prevention appears to be a relatively infrequent concern; however, those questions may reflect serious problems qualitatively. For example, one student asked, “I love pot, what can I do?” and another asked, “I think I might be addicted to heroin. How can I no longer be addicted?” While the relative infrequency of questions about avoiding or quitting drugs may not be surprising given the relatively low prevalence of students who abuse certain drugs (Johnston et al., 2014)—it may represent a very serious problem for those who are actually using drugs or feel pressure to start using them. In most of the questions about drug effects, it could not be determined whether the students were using drugs or not (e.g., “Why do drugs give you face acne?”), and some of these questions reflected an interest in other bodily issues (e.g., “i heard if u smoke rock your penis increases in size??????”). Thus, the results across drug categories accurately quantify levels of drug interest and drug curi- osity among youth but do not act as an accurate proxy of use.

Students seemed to ask questions for a variety of reasons. While some ques- tions seemed to be motivated by a real, immediate concern (e.g., worrying that they may be hooked on drugs, or wanting to help a family member quit smok- ing) more often than not students seemed to be asking questions out of a general 204Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 45(3-4) interest in drugs. Many questions seemed to indicate a future interest to experi- ment with drugs. For example, a fairly common concern was about the addic- tiveness of drugs, as reflected in questions like “If you start off on weed is there a 100% chance you will do other drugs or is it possible to just stay on weed?” Sometimes students seemed to be questioning the veracity of urban legends or rumors, as with questions like “Why do they (the man) put rocketfule in ciggerates?” and “Does ecstasy really put a pencil sized whole in your brain every time you do it?” It is likely that many students asked questions because they were required to for classroom purposes. Perhaps in defiance, or because they felt it would be fun in an anonymous, unrestricted chat forum, some stu- dents asked questions that were coded as “frivolous” (5.3%), such as “can you inhale a turtle?” or “what are the long term effects of YOUR MOM?” Other questions reflected legitimate concerns about Chat Day, such as having to wait for a response (e.g., “when are you going to start answering [our school’s] ques- tions?”), or curiosity about the expert on the other end (e.g., “have you ever smoked weed? did you like it?”).

Some questions appear to be a response to media reports about drugs. For, example, one interpretation for the precipitous rise in questions about marijuana in 2009 may be that NIDA Drug Facts Week—conducted in January each year—followed an election year in which three states (California, Michigan, and Massachusetts) had marijuana ballot initiatives (Marijuana Policy Project, 2014). The political context of changing marijuana legislation seemed evident in questions such as “What made marijuana become an illegal drug in so many states?” Such findings support previous research related to youth curiosity sur- rounding marijuana policy and marijuana use initiation (D’Amico et al., 2015).

Similarly reflecting contemporary drug issues, bath salts were a relatively new drug category in 2013, and their emergence, along with prominent news reports of alleged bath salt-related attacks in 2012, may account for the sudden appear- ance of questions about bath salts (“Face-eating cannibal attack may be latest in string of ‘bath salts’ incidents,” 2012; National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2012).

In 2013, for example, one student asked, “do bath salts make you eat people?” There are three main limitations to this study. First, although the percentages for the various drug types were based on all Chat Day questions and the various domains were estimated from a random sample of questions, the results cannot be generalized to the total population of U.S. middle and high school students.

In 2007, schools participated based purely on self-selection; because of the over- whelming number of questions, NIDA limited the number of schools that could participate in subsequent years. The basis upon which schools volunteered or NIDA approved them to participate is not known, but their selection was non-random (and was in some cases based on personal communication or rec- ommendation from a NIDA program officer). Furthermore, in some schools, students were required to participate in Chat Day—sometimes their grades depended on it—and in others, participation was voluntary. It is not known Morton et al.205 whether or how this type of coercion may have biased the kinds of questions students asked. Thus, it cannot be known how accurately the content analysis results reflect the concerns of students nationwide.

Second, these results are highly sensitive to the coding scheme and the coders’ interpretation of questions. In developing a classification scheme such as the one used in this study, the researchers carefully considered an important tradeoff. On the one hand, having a larger number of categories makes data interpretation more meaningful. For example, while it is useful to know that 30.2% of students asked for information about drugs (which we classified as “general drug infor- mation”), subcategories could have provided added research utility, such as the experience of being high versus the causes of addiction or the pharmacology of drugs. The research team involved in this study chose to omit such subcategories in order to preserve interrater reliability and make the many complex or ambigu- ous questions possible to code. This choice operated at the expense of capturing this added level of data granularity but was necessary given certain challenges with interpreting the data. For example, students often wrote in a vernacular that could be difficult to interpret, spelling was often in shorthand or contained multiple errors, and some questions were vague or unclear.

A final limitation concerns the sample size of questions; about 9% of the total questions were used in the content analysis. It is important to note that over half of the 67,051 questions came from 2007 alone, and while the overall sample was 9%, every other year under review had a roughly 20% random sample taken.

The authors are confident that saturation was reached in terms of the codes developed for drug type and question theme. However, future studies could employ different methods to analyze a larger sample of questions, creating more generalizable results.

In the future, analyses of Chat Day questions could be improved to provide students with more useful information about drugs. Other potential improve- ments to the NIDA Chat Day forum itself would be to reduce selection biases and use data more effectively. For example, NIDA could select schools ran- domly from across the country or require students to provide demographic data prior to asking questions. Gender and grade-level are commonly reported on in studies of adolescent drug use (e.g., Johnston et al., 2014), and if captured, could be analyzed across drug type or question theme domains in order to identify the kinds of information sought by specific subpopulations of students.

Other measures at the analytical stage could improve upon coding schemes, such as separating negative from positive and neutral drug effects.

It is not known whether the information that students received during Chat Day was useful or educational. Many questions, such as those about deleterious drug effects, may indicate a desire for information in order to weigh the pros and cons of using drugs themselves. It might be worthwhile, particularly given NIDA’s mandate to prevent drug use, to perform an analysis of responses from NIDA experts, or subsequently assess the utility and perceived helpfulness 206Journal of Drug Education: Substance Abuse Research and Prevention 45(3-4) of responses. Results from this study show the types and frequencies of drug information sought using Chat Day question-data, but evaluative Chat Day response-data from teens themselves could be used to improve the quality of information used for educational programs aimed at adolescents. The ultimate public-health aims of such efforts would be to help more effectively curb harms associated with problem drug use. In addition to providing a contemporary picture of adolescent drug use concerns both by substance type and drug use theme or concern, this study shows the potential for NIDA Chat Day data to be used as a research tool in the promotion of public health.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the pre- and postdoctoral fellows in the Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research Program at Public Health Solutions who participated in the development and coding of the Chat Day data.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author- ship, and/or publication of this article: Authors were supported as pre- and postdoctoral fellows and as principal investigator (Falkin) in the Behavioral Sciences Training Program in Drug Abuse Research sponsored by Public Health Solutions and Public Health Solutions with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse [grant number T32 DA007233]. Points of view, opinions, and conclusions in this article do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Government or Public Health Solutions.

Note 1. All quotes are verbatim from transcripts.

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Author Biographies Cory M. Morton, MSW, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of New Hampshire. His research interests include population-based analyses of substance abuse and child maltreatment, focused on identifying aspects of the built environment that may be leveraged for pre- vention efforts.

Heidi Hoefinger, PhD, is a Professor of Science at Berkeley College in New York City. She received her training in Social Sciences at Goldsmiths, University of London, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Behavioral Science Training in Drug Abuse Research at the National Development and Research Institutes in New York. She conducts ethnographic research on sexually and socially marginalized populations of drug users, sex workers and LGBT communities.

Rebecca Linn-Walton, PhD, LCSW, is the Director of Planning, Research, and Evaluation at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services in New York City. She is also on the adjunct faculty at the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service. Her research focuses on engagement and the therapeu- tic relationship with populations typically stigmatized and labeled difficult, such as justice-involved youth, and adults with severe mental illness who are also justice involved. She uses her background as a clinical social worker to inform her research questions and design.

Ross D. Aikins, PhD, is a Lecturer and Program Manager of the Higher Education Division in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He previously served as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., specializing in collegiate Morton et al.209 nonmedical prescription stimulant use and student veteran health. His ongoing research interests include mental health in postsecondary student populations, “enhancement” drug use, athletic doping, and sexual assault in higher education among other college student health issues.

Gregory P. Falkin, Ph.D., directs the Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse program, which is the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s largest and longest-standing institutional training program for behavioral scientists. The BST program is administered by Public Health Solutions and fellows attend weekly training sessions at National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., a leader in the field of drug abuse research. At NIDA’s request Dr.

Falkin worked with all 16 research fellows to analyze the Chat Day questions as part of their training, which culminated in this publication.

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