complete an interview with an adult member in
each of those households:
Refusal Rate Prior to Obtaining Informed
Consent: Thirty-seven percent (1,364
respondents) broke off before the
interviewer could obtain informed consent.
The remaining 63 percent (2,299
respondents) stayed on the line and
answered the informed consent question.
Refusal Rate of Informed Consent: Sixty-
nine percent (1,595 respondents) agreed to
the informed consent question. The
remaining 31 percent (704 respondents)
refused at the point of informed consent and
terminated the survey.
Breakoff Rate: Once the survey questions
began, 82 percent (1,303 respondents)
completed the interview. The remaining 18
percent (292 respondents) terminated the
survey before it was completed.
Overall, 35.6 percent (1303/3663) of those we
attempted to contact completed the survey.
Surveys of Addiction Treatment
Directors and Staff Providers in
New York State
CASA Columbia collaborated with the Survey
Research Laboratory (SRL) of the University of
Illinois at Chicago to obtain a representative
sample of treatment facilities and programs (and
their directors and staff) in New York State.
The goal of the surveys was to explore the types
of treatment services provided in addiction
treatment facilities and programs in New York,
how performance and outcomes are assessed and
the attitudes and beliefs of treatment providers
concerning addiction and its treatment. (See
Appendix D for the program directors’ survey
instrument and response frequencies and
Appendix E for the staff providers’ survey
instrument and response frequencies.)
The target population included addiction
treatment providers, including Department of
Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities, located in New
York State. Because the number of facilities
that treated adolescents was too few for us to
draw a representative sample across New York
State given our limited resources, only adult-
only treatment centers were eligible to
participate in the survey. We received the initial
sample frame from the New York State Office
of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services
(OASAS). The goal was to complete interviews
with the director and two staff members at 75
treatment facilities, for a total of 225 interviews
(75 directors plus 150 staff members). We
estimated that we would need to begin with a
sample of 500 treatment facilities in order to
obtain the target number of completed
interviews.The methodology, recruiting and screening
materials, consent protocols and survey
instruments were approved by CASA
Columbia’s IRB.Between December 17, 2008 and February 27,
2009, 83 facilities agreed to participate, resulting
in interviews with 83 facility directors and 141
staff treatment providers within the 83 facilities.
The survey protocol utilized multiple data
collection modalities including telephone, fax
and the Internet. To construct the initial frame
of 500 facilities, SRL staff telephoned facilities
to ensure that they were still in business and still
seeing patients/clients. Once a pool of more
than 500 eligible facilities was created, we
issued screening forms to the pool to assess
which facilities would be willing to participate;
224 of the 549 eligible facilities completed the
screening instrument, resulting in a 40.8 percent
screening response rate. Since our goal was 75
completed facility surveys, we recruited in
blocks of 20 from the 224 facilities that
completed the screening instrument. We
exceeded the goal, resulting in a completion
rate of 15.1 percent (83/549) of eligible
facilities, or 37.1 percent (83/224) of responding
facilities.The simple margin of error (calculated without
taking into account the complex sampling
structure) was approximately +/- 10 percent for
the director survey and approximately +/- 8
percent for the staff provider survey.