yougov17drugs: YouGov 2017 Poll of Illegal Drug Use
In mark-andrews/isdsr-pkg: Tools and Datasets to Accompany ISDSR Textbook

yougov17drugs

R Documentation

YouGov 2017 Poll of Illegal Drug Use

Description

Data concerning the question "Have you ever taken an illegal drug?" that was in a 2017 poll of 1300 British young adults. Individual respondents' data are not available but respondents were grouped into various demographic groups, including age group and gender. Here, we report the number of respondents in each combination of gender and age group who gave each of the 8 possible responses to the question.

Format

A data frame with 48 rows and 4 variables:

gender: (factor) Respondents' gender (male/female)
age: (ordinal) Age group (16-18, 19-21, 22-24)
response: (factor) Each possible response to the question "Have you ever taken an illegal drug". There were 8 possible responses: 1) "I have taken illegal drugs frequently and still do", 2) "I have taken illegal drugs frequently but have now stopped completely", 3) "I have taken illegal drugs occasionally and still do", 4) "I have taken illegal drugs occasionally but have now stopped completely", 5) "I have only taken illegal drugs once or twice", 6) "I’ve never taken any illegal drugs", 7) "Not sure", 8) "Prefer not to say".
count: (numeric) The number of respondents who gave each particular response to the question.

Details

The poll in which this question occurred was conducted between the 27th June and the 5th July 2017. A total of 1300 young adults were surveyed, all of whom were residents of the Britain (England, Wales, or Scotland), and whose ages ranged from 16 to 24. The individual respondent level data were not made available. However, the number of individuals in various demographic categories, including age, gender, etc., were provided. In addition, the percentage of individuals in each category that chose each possible response to the question was provided. For example, the report of the poll results states that there were 162 males in the 16-18 age group. It also states that 12% of respondents in this male 16-18 group responded to the question with "I have taken illegal drugs occasionally and still do". If we assume that this entails that 12% of the 162 individuals in this group responded in this way, then this is approximately 19 individuals in this gender and age group who responded this way. It should be noted, however, that it is not obvious that the count of the number of individuals in each group who responded in any given way can be obtained simply by multiplying the reported percentage by the reported total, as we have just done. The percentages may have been calculated using some weighting formula. Although it is not explicitly stated that this was done, the report does provide unweighted as well as weighted totals in each demographic category, and thus it may be that some weighting was applied to obtain the reported percentage. Notwithstanding this possibility, here we report counts for each category and response type obtaining by simply multiplying the stated unweighted total for each category by the stated percentage for each possible response.