Data were collected by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Princeton, NJ, and prepared for release by Synectics for Management Decisions, Inc., Arlington, VA. UFDS is a point-prevalence survey. It provides information on the substance abuse treatment system and its clients on the reference date. Client counts do not represent annual totals. Rather, UFDS provides a "snapshot" of substance abuse treatment facilities and clients on an average day. UFDS collects data about facilities, not individual clients. Data on clients represent an aggregate of clients in treatment for each reporting facility. For the few facilities that did not provide client demographics, missing data were imputed using averaged responses from facilities in the same state and with similar ownership and client mix characteristics. For each variable containing imputed data, there is a corresponding imputation flag variable that indicates whether a case's value on the variable resulted from an actual response or was imputed. UFDS attempts to obtain responses from all known treatment and prevention facilities, but it is a voluntary survey. There is no adjustment for facility nonresponse. To protect the privacy of respondents, all variables that could be used to identify individual facilities, including financial data originally collected, have been removed from the public use file. These modifications should not affect most analytic uses of the public use file.

The Uniform Facility Data Set (UFDS) was designed to measure the scope and use of drug abuse treatment services in the United States. The survey collects information from each privately- and publicly-funded facility in the country that provides substance abuse treatment as well as from state-identified facilities that provide other substance abuse services. Data are collected on a number of topics including facility operation, services provided (assessment, therapy, testing, health, continuing care, special programs, transitional services, community outreach, ancillary), type of treatment, numbers of clients, and various client characteristics. The main objective of the UFDS is to produce data that can be used to assess the nature and extent of substance abuse treatment services, to assist in the forecast of treatment resource requirements, to analyze treatment service trends, to conduct national, regional, and state-level comparative analyses of treatment services and utilization, and to generate the National Directory of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Treatment Programs and its on-line equivalent, the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator.

The sample included all facilities in the National Master Facility Inventory (NMFI). The NMFI is a comprehensive listing of all known substance abuse treatment facilities and state-identified prevention and education facilities. Questionnaires were distributed to 21,825 facilities in the following general categories: treatment facilities administratively tracked by states and reporting to the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) (about 9,500), treatment facilities administratively tracked by states but not reporting to TEDS (about 3,600), treatment facilities not administratively tracked by states (about 3,000), and nontreatment facilities administratively tracked by states (about 2,900). Of these facilities, 2,651 (12 percent) were determined to have been closed or were not providing substance abuse services on October 1, 1998, the survey reference date. This yielded an effective sample size of 19,174.

Response Rates: The response rate of the effective sample was 90 percent (17,321). This data collection is comprised of only the subset of these facilities that provide treatment and/or detoxification services, either alone or in conjunction with other substance abuse services. This includes 13,455 treatment facilities, or 78 percent of those facilities that responded to the survey. Because some of these facilities combined client counts for affiliated facilities, the client counts actually include data on 13,880 facilities. A total of 78 percent of the 13,455 facilities completed the mail questionnaire and 22 percent completed the survey in a telephone interview directed at mail nonrespondents.

ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Performed consistency checks.; Created online analysis version with question text.; Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..

National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS) Series

Datasets: DS1: Uniform Facility Data Set, 1998: [United States]