#dmav

Finding a Relation Between Heroin Addiction and Relationship Status

The question that I am interested in at this point of time is whether heroin addiction is related to the respondent relationship status. I want to know whether having a spouse is directly or indirectly related to the respondent’s addiction.

Around 47 percent of all the respondent do not have spouses and 53 percent of them do.  On the other hand, I pulled the graph for how often did these respondents used heroin in the last 12 months. Since it was already in small number of categories, I didn’t have to categories.

Managing the Data

Besides some of the missing data available in the survey which needs to be set aside, there are also a lot of observations that are blank, but valid, and needs to be coded in and the values be recorded. For instance, for the question “Age first used drugs” there are more than 4,000 blank answers because it’s not applicable for those respondents who said they have never used drugs. Thus, there are a lot of “skip patterns” that need to be coded in appropriately and as valid data by replacing the values to “11”.

It’s going to work like a filter. So if someone has been a “lifetime nondrug user” that also means that he is she has never used heroin and thus a skip pattern is generated here. Following on that, if someone responds “No” to the question “Ever Used Heroin”, that means all the questions following this question about heroin use is going to be inappropriate, so another skip pattern is generated. The only missing data that needs to be excluded from the evaluation is the unknown responses on the question “Ever Used Heroin”.

I then categorized the age into three categories. Important thing to notice is there you can see age of “99”, which represents the people who have never used drugs. I replaced the “11” cod (used on other tables) with “99” to make sure it does not contradict the actual value of age “11”, and avoid misrepresentation. Accordingly, I am grouping the ages i.e. below 17 as group 1, 18-27 as group 2, and 28 above as group 3.

Heroin Addiction

After brainstorming numerous ideas and looking through the problem sets, I was still confused on what to problem to work on, that will keep me interested and I can actually learn from my findings. This took me several days, until I thought why not think about the problems my country is currently facing. With that in mind, I mentally positioned myself back on the streets of my home city, Kabul, Afghanistan, and looked around to see what problem do I immediately notice. While it wasn’t to come up with a huge list, one of the problems that is too common and that no one is actually working on it is excessive drug use, specifically, heroin. There are hundreds of men, located under the bridges and destroyed constructions injecting themselves and taking heroin by some other methods, which I have limited knowledge about at this point of time.

The question that comes to my mind, looking at all these people are, weather addiction to heroin is related to their income, and whether immigration has to do something with the addiction. This is because, most of them are poor and homeless, or maybe they became homeless because they spent everything on their drug. Also because most of these people had once migrated to some neighboring countries and brought this habit with them from there.

1.     I chose NESCAR data set.

2. Topic of interest:

a.     Heroin addiction

3.     Variables:

a.     Relation of heroin addiction with income

b.     Relation of heroin addiction with migration

4.     Code book pages:

a.     NESCAR (107 – 290)

5.     Literature Review

a.     Although there wasn’t much written about the topic under discussion about Afghanistan, the following might be helpful to find a relation between the occurring issues.

i.     http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376871602003423 ii.     http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2007.01018.x/full

b.     Following research is really helpful in finding out the origins of the problem and the risks associated with it.

i.     http://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7517-2-13

 ii.     http://www.organized-crime.de/revmcc01.htm

6.     Hypothesis:

 a.     There is a strong relation between excessive drug use and local drug production.

b.    There is a direct relation between income level, whether the person has migrated, and heroin addiction.