Data collection and analysis is one of the most critical parts of any research. My research intersects with a complex set of factors to consider. The paper proposal compares the effect on adult substance use of treating children with ADHD with medication and alternative non-pharmaceutical methods. This means that it is necessary to start collecting studies on the following topics: 1) the causal relationship between ADHD children and substance abuse in adulthood; 2) medication-treated ADHD children and its effects on drug and alcohol use in adulthood; 3) alternatively treated ADHD children and substance abuse later in life.
This type of study will use anonymous statistics on inpatient, outpatient, and prescribed medicines. For example, the MarketScan databases include over 146 million unique participant observations (Quinn, 2017). Records related to childhood substance use are rare, so most information is available from age 13 (Quinn, 2017). After collecting information on groups of children treated with medications and alternative methods, group differences for individuals can be analyzed using conditional logistic regression (Quinn, 2017). This allows for identifying the development of the risk of events over time.
Research on alternative methods can be difficult because databases are not maintained on them, as on the use of medical treatment. This means that this part of the work will have to rely on collecting qualitative data from the histories of patients with ADHD who received alternative non-drug treatments without additional drugs (Wilens & Kaminski, 2018). Such cases may include psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, and other methods described in detail in the literature (Wilens & Kaminski, 2018). This combination of quantitative statistical and qualitative descriptive methods has a disadvantage as it represents different sides of the topic unequally and can distort the big picture.
References
Quinn, P. D., Chang, Z., Hur, K., Gibbons, R. D., Lahey, B. B., Rickert, M. E., Sjolander, A., Lichtenstein, P., Larsson, H. & D’Onofrio, B. M. (2017). ADHD medication and substance-related problems. American Journal of Psychiatry, 174(9), 877-885. Web.
Wilens, T. E., & Kaminski, T. A. (2018). The co-occurrence of ADHD and substance use disorders. Psychiatric Annals, 48(7), 328-332. Web.