APPENDIX H Credibility of Contact Claims

We have, at several points in the text discussion, had occasion to refer to the statistics of items G 48 ("Seeing someone take heroin") and G 49 ("Knowing at least one heroin-user"). Thirty-nine per cent of the boys in High claimed that they had seen someone take heroin, and 45 per cent claimed that they knew one or more heroin-users. The corresponding figures in Medium were almost 25 and 331/4 per cent, respectively, and in Low they were 13 and 17 per cent. Add to the statistics on these items those of G 50: 10 per cent of the boys in both High and Medium and 6 per cent of those in Low claimed that they had themselves had a chance to use heroin. It should be remembered that we are talking about eighth-grade boys—thirteen and fourteen years old. Are the figures credible?

Even if we were to assume that the boys responded to these items with complete honesty, there might still be special factors operating to inflate these figures. Thus, it is possible that much furtive-appearing behavior lends itself to the imaginative but incorrect interpretation that someone is taking heroin. Similarly, peculiar behavior of any sort may be interpreted as owing to the influence of dope; it may be that the interpretation, "He must have just taken . . ." is readily transformed in retrospect into, "I saw him take. . . ." Also, there is a fairly good likelihood that the boys did not distinguish any more than do adults between rumors and factual knowledge concerning a person's habits. As to the opportunity to take heroin, how fine a line can youngsters (or adults, for that matter) be expected to draw between a real offer, with the drug in physical evidence, and a suggestion made by someone who merely claims to have access?

Granted that it would be naïve to accept the positive answers to these items at face value, the neighborhood differences in percentages do constitute prima-facie evidence that drug use by older individuals does touch the lives of eighth-grade children and that, the greater the incidence, the more this tends to be generally true. The differences in percentages of positive response did correspond to known differences in incidence of drug use.

Moreover, the responses to at least G 48 and G 491 were internally consistent. The tetrachoric correlations between the two items were .84 in Low and .76 in both Medium and High. The profile correlations were .86 in Low, .84 in Medium, and .91 in High. The profile correlations were particularly impressive because they indicated that not only did the boys tend to answer the two items in the same manner, but that, depending on their answers to these two items, they tended to maintain corresponding consistent patterns of response to all items in the questionnaire.

The internal evidence also indicates that, however inflated the claims of knowing heroin-users and having seen people taking heroin may be, the positive answers to these items were, in fact, associated with contact with the drug-using subculture. Apart from their correlations with each other, the highest correlation of each of the two items was with G 47, the positive answers to the contact items tending to go with the claim to have got most of one's information about drugs from the street.a

In this connection, one would expect a priori that "information" from teachers and parents would be primarily on moral and health aspects and that "information" from reading would be primarily newspaper accounts of the perennial wiping-out of the narcotics traffic, the sheer fact that such traffic is illegal, the association between narcotics and crime, and the occasional deaths resulting from overdosage. The information items in the questionnaires had little, if anything, to do with these varieties of information,2 but were mainly concerned with matters that would be of some functional significance to someone attracted by drug use. We have already noted that the kinds of information sampled in the questionnaire tended to go with the two contact and the information-from-the-street items. That is, positive answers to these items bespoke contact with the drug-using subculture, if not direct acquaintance with heroin-users or the witnessing of heroin use.

There is also some internal evidence in connection with the information items that, if the figures on G 48 and G 49 were inflated, they were less so in High' than in Low. Of the ten highest tetrachoric correlations with G 48 in High, five involved information items; of the ten highest with G 49, seven involved information items. In Low, on the other hand, there were no information items involved in the ten highest correlations with G 48, and five in the ten highest correlations with G 49. Thus, the relationship between claimed contact and information seemed to be more intimate and direct in High than in Low, suggesting a stronger foundation for the claims in High.

A related finding pointing in the same direction involved a compound item, G 17, 25. This item was designed to test knowledge of the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony3 in the possession of heroin. According to the law at the time of the administration of the questionnaire, the possession of one-quarter ounce was a felony, of a smaller amount, a misdemeanor. The first of the component items correctly placed the dividing line; the second incorrectly placed it at one-half ounce. Knowledge of the point at issue would require saying "true" to the first and "false" to the second. Too few of the boys (from 10 to 15 per cent) gave both correct responses to justify the utilization of the item in the cluster analysis.

The pattern of errors is, however, of interest. Many more of the boys who gave definite responses to both items—i.e., did not say "don't know" to either —in Low than in High (60 versus 29 per cent) said "false" to both. The implication is that either one-half ounce does not sound like much or that the possession of any amount is equally against the law; in either case, the pattern does not bespeak much contact. Saying "true" to one, however, and "false" to the other—or, for that matter, saying "true" to both—does, at least, suggest an awareness of the principle that the amount of heroin in one's possession makes a difference from the viewpoint of the law and of the fact that a half-ounce is an appreciable quantity.

STATISTICAL FOOTNOTES

a The tetrachoric correlations of G 47 and G 48 were .58, .50, and,.51 in Low, Medium, and High, respectively; for G 47 and G 49, they were .72, .48, and .57.

1 As already explained, correlational statistics were not computed for G 50.

2 Some were, of course, covered in the argument and image-of-the-user items. On other possible items, we anticipated that the information would be so generally available as to produce no discrimination. On supposed health effects, we know of few effects that can be consistently attributed to the drugs themselves, rather than to the conditions of taking them—e.g., the risk of infection in unsterilized needles, the unstandardized dosages in the illicit product, the chronic anxiety of the addict over maintenance of supply, the neglect of a balanced diet, etc.—and these would be either too technical or have to be stated with too many qualifications to be usable as true-false information items.

3 The legal terms were, of course, not used. The distinction was put in terms of the amount of punishment.