| Biography | Lloyd D. Johnston is Program Director and Distinguished Research Scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. His particular expertise is in national trends in drug use and related factors among adolescents, college students, and young adults. Dr. Johnston has been the principal investigator of the Monitoring the Future study, a series of annual surveys conducted since 1975, tracking beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of U.S. youth toward many subjects, including drug, alcohol and tobacco use. A social psychologist by training, he has served as advisor to the White House, Congress, and many other national and international bodies and has conducted research on a wide range of issues, including the use of alcohol, tobacco, and various illicit drugs; institutional trust; policy evaluation; and the functioning of American high schools. His research interests also include international comparative studies and the application of survey research to social problems generally.The "Monitoring the Future" study has been supported since its inception under a series of investigator-initiated research grants from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Annual surveys of high school seniors began in 1975, and annual surveys of eighth- and 10th-grade students were added, beginning in 1991. At each grade level students are drawn to be representative of all students in public and private schools in the coterminous United States. They complete self-administered, optically-scanned questionnaires given to them in their classrooms in the spring of the year by U-M personnel. In 1999 the sample sizes for eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-grades, respectively, were 17,300, 13,900, and 14,100. In all, about 45,000 students located in 433 secondary schools participated in the study. The MTF study is the leading national indicator of the prevalence of drug use among American adolescents and young people.
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