After the initial round of letters was mailed, the response from schools was not yet sufficient to ensure that all regions of the state were sufficiently represented. Therefore, targeted contacts were made to schools that were in geographically underrepresented areas to ensure that the sample was representative of the state. The final survey contains schools from each geographical region of the state of Connecticut, and it contains schools from each of the three tiers of the state’s district reference groups (DRGs). DRGs are groupings of schools based on the socioeconomic status of the families in the school district. Sampling from each of the three tiers of the DRGs was intended to create a more socioeconomically representative sample. Although this was not a random sample of public high school students in CT, the sample obtained in this study is similar in demographics to the sample of CT residents enumerated in the 2000 Census ages 14–18.
