Measuring Drug and Alcohol Use Among College Student-Athletes * James N. Druckman, Northwestern University Mauro Gilli, Northwestern University Samara Klar, University of Arizona Joshua Robison, Aahus University Objective. Few issues in athletics today receive more attention than drug and alcohol usage, especially when it comes to college athletics. We seek to address self-report biases related to drug usage and heavy drinking. Methods. We employ an experimental measurement technique. Results. Our results suggest that a greater percentage of student-athletes from a major conference knowingly engage in these two behaviors than self-reports indicate. Specifically, we find 37 percent of respondents seem to have taken banned performance-enhancing drugs (compared to 4.9 percent who directly admit to doing so when asked), and 46 percent seem to have consumed more than five drinks in a week (compared to about 3 percent who openly admit to doing so). Conclusions. We provide evidence for the extent of self-underreporting when it comes to drug and alcohol usage among college athletes. That said, future work is needed to accurately pinpoint specific substances and the frequency with which they are taken; for example, it could be the percentage of individuals using banned substances stems from consuming significant concentrations of caffeine (e.g., multiple cups of coffee). Drug and alcohol use by college students is a frequently debated and often controversial topic. This subject has received particular attention when it comes to student-athletes. Evidence of the importance of assessing drug and alcohol usage among student-athletes is exemplified by a 2012 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) report whose “primary objective [was] to update NCAA policy makers with both current and historical information concerning levels of drug and alcohol use by student-athletes within college athletics” (2012: 4). In this article, we employ an experimental technique that allows us to offer a more accurate assessment of usage than extant studies provide. We begin in the next section with a literature review that leads us to an explication of our approach. We then present results from our survey. Our evidence demonstrates that the commonly used self-report method for estimating drug and alcohol use found in existing studies, including in the aforementioned NCAA report, seem to understate usage. The Challenge of Measuring Drug and Alcohol Usage To our knowledge, there is surprisingly little written on drug use among college student- athletes and, when it comes to student-athletes’ own input on this controversial issue, ∗ Direct correspondence to James N. Druckman, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Scott Hall, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 〈druckman@northwestern.edu〉. All data and coding for replication purposes are available at James N. Druckman’s professional webpage 〈http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/publications.html〉. The authors thank the many students at Northwestern University who assisted with data collection. SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 96, Number 2, June 2015 C  2014 by the Southwestern Social Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12135