Using social indicators to inform community drug and alcohol prevention policy

In recent years, the federal government has begun to require state agencies to allocate drug prevention resources according to the needs of local comm unities. The methods by which this is to be accomplished have not been desc ribed, and most published social indicator studies in the field of drug abu se research have used county-level data which are too insensitive to local needs to be of use in resource allocation decisions. The present study desc ribes a needs assessment in drug abuse prevention in the state of New Jerse y using municipal-level social indicator data. In addition, it examines the extent to which the resource allocation of one state prevention agency can be predicted by the municipal-level social indicators. Thirty-six social i ndicators pertaining to 508 municipalities were used in the study, and data were analyzed using principal component analysis and hierarchical regressi on analysis. Five factors were extracted from the principal component analy sis, two of which clearly describe "high risk" municipalities and one of wh ich clearly describes "low risk" municipalities. The regression analysis sh owed that these factors explained very little of the variance in the state agency's drug prevention spending. The study shows that social indicators c an be used to distinguish between different levels of need for drug prevent ion services at a municipal level, and that these data can be used to infor m decisions concerning resource allocation.