Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 78

There are two broad types of surveys. A descriptive survey is designed to gather accurate information about, for example, members of a certain group, people in a given geographic area, or people in a particular organization. The best-known descriptive surveys are those conducted by organizations such as Gallup to gather information on the preferences, beliefs, and attitudes of given samples of people.

Ask Yourself

Has the increasing legalization of marijuana throughout the United States altered the data on marijuana use among high school seniors? Why or why not? How might any change affect data on the use of other drugs?

For many years, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has conducted a descriptive survey of high school seniors in the United States. One of the subjects has been marijuana use. As you can see in Figure 2.3, the prevalence of marijuana use among high school seniors has risen and fallen, as if in waves. Marijuana use in this group peaked in 1979 (with more than half of students admitting use of the drug), reached a low of 22 percent in 1992, and has generally risen since then, although it has never again approached the 1979 level. In 2017, 37 percent of twelfth graders reported having used marijuana in the previous 12 months.

Description

Figure 2.3 Marijuana Use Among U.S. High School Seniors, 1976–2017

Source: Data from Lloyd D. Johnston, Patrick O’Malley, Richard A. Miech, Jerald G. Bachman, and John E. Schulenberg. Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975–2017: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use, Table 6 (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 2017).

The data in Figure 2.3 are derived from descriptive surveys, but what if we wanted to explain, and not just statistically describe, changes in marijuana use among high school seniors? To get at this, we would need to do an explanatory survey, which seeks to uncover potential causes of, in this case, changes in marijuana use (e.g., the legalization of marijuana in states such as Colorado, California, and Maine [Monte, Zane, and Heard 2015]). For example, having discovered variations in marijuana use by high school students over the years, we might hypothesize that the variation is linked to students’ (and perhaps the general public’s) changing perceptions about the riskiness of marijuana use. Specifically, we might hypothesize that as students (and the public) increasingly come to see marijuana as less risky, marijuana use among students will go up. In this case, we would use the survey to learn more about respondents’ attitudes toward and beliefs about the riskiness of marijuana use and not simply measure student use of marijuana.