Substance Abuse Patterns of NCAA

¶ … substance abuse patterns of NCAA student-athletes" for a wide range of substances both legal and illegal (p. 51 Abstract). The abstract is broken into sections for objective, design, participants, main outcome measures, results and conclusion. This format is easy to follow and allows the reader to understand immediately all of the important information about the study. The introduction itself (p.51) provides a clear outline of the issue, providing valuable background and contextual information. The introduction is well-written. The study is given ample justification, e.g.

"This information is potentially helpful in designing educational and drug-testing programs for college-age athletes." The purpose of the study is outlined clearly. The study does not make clear the variables that will be involved; the study is framed more as a survey. The authors note that the survey will allow for statistical breakdown of the data by teams, NCAA division and by racial/ethnic group. The paper lacks a literature review.

There is a brief mention in the Subjects and Methods section (p.52) that the NCAA has conducted previous similar studies. The findings of these studies are not discussed. Instead, the authors raise the subject of these studies because those studies provided the framework for the current study. Given that there is no literature review, it is a fair assessment than this is not sufficient. A high-level research paper should feature a literature review that demonstrates that the researchers have a mastery of the subject material.

A literature review will also help to guide the research so that it contributes to the body of literature (Hart, 1999). Without the literature review, this study is in a vacuum with respect to the subject, in danger of simply duplicating the NCAA studies while contributing nothing meaningful or insightful to the academic discourse. There is a brief reference list at the end of the article, outlining eight sources that were cited at various points. This is insufficient for an academic research paper.

The literature review should provide information that directly discusses the subject of the paper. The sources should build a case for the current study, and should direct the authors to the research question. Without a literature review, it is difficult to determine how the authors derived the research question. In addition, the sources in the literature review should work together to provide the context for the study.

Without such background from academic sources, the reader is left to take the authors at their word that the study is important and makes a valuable contribution. The authors do provide ample discussion of the methodology and sampling under the "Subjects and Methods" section (p. 52). The sampling plan is outlined, and the authors note that it was based on the prior NCAA studies. The sampling plan is not random. The subjects of the study are students, but there was no attempt to randomize the sampling.

Instead, the authors chose the schools and the athletic programs within the schools. The students self-selected for participation, which also may have affected the participation rates. Because the schools and athletic programs were involved, the subjects may have been wary of the promise of confidentiality, causing the results to have some bias. Singer, von Thurn and Miller (1995) note that when the data is sensitive, confidentiality assurances can improve the quality of responses. However, the confidentiality promise needs to come from the researcher in order to be completely trustworthy.

Thus, the methodology introduced some bias into the study with the design of its confidentiality mechanism, and the researchers introduced bias when they failed to randomize school and program selection. The independent variable is the prevalence of drug usage. The dependent variables were the NCAA division, the team, the gender and the race/ethnicity of the respondents. The responses were in the form of categorical variables (yes or no).

The responses were subject to Chi-squared analysis to "determine if sport division or ethnic category could differentiate drug-use patterns among collegiate student-athletes" (p.52). This test does provide information regarding the statistical difference between the groups (p.52) but the authors choose not to interpret the data further. The authors discuss the statistical, but not practical significance of their findings. This approach is appropriate, since the role of the study is to inform policy, not set policy.

The issue with the paper lies not with the methods of statistical analysis but rather with the methods of.