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Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

Monitoring the Future has been studying the behaviors, attitudes, and values of American students for 50 years. In that half century of research, the study has compiled data on more than 1.7 million students in the United States, tracking a subset of more than 120,000 of them longitudinally from 12th grade into adulthood. Along the way, researchers have monitored the students’ use and changing attitudes towards many drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, as well as other aspects of their unfolding lives, following them as they graduated from high school, progressed into college or employment, started families, and moved throughout adulthood.

Today, the earliest students surveyed by Monitoring the Future are in their 60s, providing a rare body of information across the life course. And that body of information is still growing every year, as it continues to document the changes taking place across generations.  

How Monitoring the Future began

One major study preceded Monitoring the Future. The Youth in Transition study collected data for a longitudinal study of young men, surveying male students entering the 10th grade from 1966 through 1974. First funded by the U.S. Office of Education, the project initially focused on an educational issue rather than a social one: the major causes and consequences of dropping out of high school.

Youth in Transition showed the need for a different kind of study: a nationally representative survey of the use of drugs among youth in America, an emerging national problem at the time. During the later years of the study, researchers Jerald Bachman and Lloyd Johnston began to develop a proposal for a more elaborate survey, one that would follow multiple cohorts rather than just one, in addition to surveying women. It ultimately focused on the emerging issue of drug abuse, about which Johnston had written an early book that drew the attention of the nation’s drug czar at that time, Robert Dupont. His office and the newly formed National Institute on Drug Abuse provided the initial funding for Monitoring the Future. 

Monitoring the Future surveyed its first class of graduating seniors in 1975, and over the intervening half century, the survey has grown dramatically. Today, a national sample of about 10,000 seniors in the coterminous United States is selected from approximately 100 schools. These students answer confidential questionnaires in their classrooms under the guidance and supervision of trained field staff from the Institute for Social Research. 

In addition, a subset of participants who have graduated from high school answer annual follow-up surveys for decades after their graduation, with the oldest cohorts now in their 60s. All groups in the survey answer key questions about drug and alcohol use, characteristics of their social environment, behavior, lifestyle, and health and well-being.

Key figures in the history of Monitoring the Future

Johnston and Bachman were key early figures in the development and launch of Monitoring the Future, with Johnston taking the lead role for the first 43 years of the study, given its central focus on drug use. Shortly after Monitoring the Future’s initial survey of high school students, researcher Patrick O’Malley, who had worked with both Johnston and Bachman on the original Youth in Transition study, also joined the team. The three collaborated on Monitoring the Future for nearly 50 years, filling a variety of roles in conducting and publicizing the study. 

Later, they were joined by a fourth important investigator: John Schulenberg, a developmental psychologist with an interest in Monitoring the Future’s panel data — the information collected on students beyond high school — but also with an involvement in the in-school surveys.

As the original founders approached retirement, Johnston expressed concern about the study coming to an end if and when they left the project. With that in mind, Monitoring the Future recruited researcher Richard Miech in 2017, then a professor at the University of Colorado, to helm the in-school surveys, while Schulenberg took over as principal investigator of the panel study. In 2022 developmental psychologist Megan Patrick, who had joined the study as a research fellow in 2009, replaced Schulenberg as the principal investigator of the panel study. Miech and Patrick remain as the co-principal investigators of Monitoring the Future to this day.

Monitoring the Future’s present and future

The overall mission of the study has remained consistent, but the survey has continued to expand over its lifetime. Since its original survey of graduating students in 1975, Monitoring the Future has grown to include about 1.7 million students in the in-school study and 120,000 people in its ongoing panel study, while adding new areas of focus to cover emerging issues. 

While the original survey only targeted 12th grade students, Monitoring the Future added additional annual data collections on 8th and 10th grade students beginning in 1991. Along with adding in new students, Monitoring the Future gradually added to its core mission by assessing the various causes and effects of the drug use studied in the survey. The data produced provides an early warning sign of the emergence of new substances in addition to tracking attitudes and beliefs about drugs and their availability. Today, researchers track about 60 different classes and subclasses of drugs.

Over the years Monitoring the Future has also come to serve as a model for many other countries to conduct ongoing surveys of drug use in their own youth populations. Working with various international organizations — including the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, and the United Nations Division of Narcotic Drugs — Johnston visited with scholars in a dozen countries to help design those studies. He also participated in a committee of the Council of Europe where they initiated an ongoing coordinated series of school surveys on drug use modeled after Monitoring the Future in as many as 30 countries in Europe. 

Monitoring the Future managed to maintain its data collection practices throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, but the period wasn’t without its challenges. In-school data collection halted on March 14, 2020 due to in-person restrictions at the University of Michigan, leading to a sample size for that year that was about a quarter of the size of standard data collection. Results from the data collected remained in line with other years, though.

Following the abbreviated collection period in 2020, Monitoring the Future used web-based surveys for its in-school data collection in 2021, similar to methods used for the panel study since 2018. Since most students in the sample were learning remotely in hopes of preventing the spread of the virus, students used school-specific web addresses and their personal electronic devices to complete the questionnaire that year — a move made possible in part by Monitoring the Future’s timely transition to tablet data collection for the school-based surveys in 2019, just a year before the pandemic hit. 

Throughout the decades, Monitoring the Future’s consistent data collection and analysis has monitored a changing landscape of substance use and misuse in the United States. The substances in the surveys have changed dramatically, as have the accompanying attitudes toward them. Vaping and e-cigarettes now have a significant impact both on the surveys themselves and the students producing the data, the opioid epidemic is a national concern, and changing attitudes toward the legality of substances like marijuana and psychedelics are a growing part of the national conversation about drugs.

And as the panel study participants age, Monitoring the Future is becoming a key part of the conversation about death and aging. The first surveyed cohort will turn 70 years old in 2028, giving researchers new insights into information about caregiving, retirement, disability, and chronic medical conditions. These data are unique and important because they contain prospective measures starting when the respondents were in high school and throughout their young and middle adulthood. Using these data, researchers can examine the long-term effects of adolescent behaviors and attitudes, and whether these effects have changed over time.

Future panel studies could include data collection from web-based cognitive tests, opening the door to more data on cognitive aging and decline in connection with substance use earlier in life. Data on dates and causes of death are being added to provide information on long-term mortality.

What started as a glimpse into the lives of high school students has become so much more. Monitoring the Future is more than just a study of students — it’s a comprehensive look at the life course of Americans of all ages.