REPORTS OF SMOKING IN A NATIONAL SURVEY - DATA FROM SCREENING AND DETAILED INTERVIEWS, AND FROM SELF-ADMINISTERED AND INTERVIEWER-ADMINISTERED QUESTIONS

PURPOSE: This study compares responses to questions about smoking in a brief screening interview with those from a subsequent, more detailed interview; it also compares responses to self-administered questions and questions administered by interviewers. The data are from the 1994 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). METHODS: About 22000 respondents completed the main questionnaire of the 1994 NHSDA. Earli er, a member of each sample household had been asked to provide screen ing information including smoking status, for each person in the house hold. Then, one or more persons in the household were interviewed abou t their own smoking and drug use; for some respondents, the questions about smoking were self-administered and for others they were administ ered by an interviewer. We examined discrepancies between reports abou t smoking from the screening data and main interview data; we also com pared the results across the two versions of the main interview smokin g questions (self and interviewer-administered). RESULTS: The screenin g data produced lower estimated rates of smoking than did the main int erview data, particularly when proxies provided the screening data. In the main interviews, self-administered questions produced higher esti mates of the prevalence of smoking than interviewer-administered quest ions, but only for adolescents. CONCLUSIONS: Proxies can provide some information about smoking, although the data are likely to be biased f or younger age groups and for infrequent smokers. For adolescents, sel f-administration appears to elicit more candid reports about smoking t han interviewer administration. In addition, multiple items may help t o capture smoking reports by persons who are reluctant to admit they h ave smoked recently or whose status as smokers is unclear. (C) 1998 El sevier Science Inc.