About OYOF

Supporting the Health of Indigenous Youth

Our Youth, Our Future (OYOF) is an ongoing survey project that provides the only source of nationally-representative substance use data specifically for reservation-area Indigenous adolescents living on reservations,  a population that experiences large health disparities.

In particular, these young people report consistently elevated substance use levels compared to their national peers. Reservation-area American Indian* youth experience significant risk factors that increase substance use risk; however, their families, communities, and cultures provide critical sources of resilience that empower them to make healthy decisions.

Focusing exclusively on youth who live on or near reservations, the Our Youth, Our Future study represents an ongoing effort to provide better data on adolescent substance use, along with comprehensive information regarding critical risk and protective factors, to tribes, schools, funders, and other decision-makers.

How is the OYOF study designed and who participates?

All students enrolled in a reservation-area school and present during survey administration provide data for this study through a school-based survey, with approximately 30 middle and high schools surveyed each year.

All schools located on or within 25 miles of a federally-recognized reservation in the continental United States that have at least 20% American Indian* student enrollment and at least 20 students total per grade are eligible to participate in OYOF.

Each year, we contact a random sample of eligible schools  from seven geographic regions meeting OYOF study criteria and invite them to participate.

Participation is completely voluntary. If school officials are interested in having their schools participate, we obtain all necessary approvals from school boards, tribal IRBs, and other required approving bodies.

What happens after schools agree and are approved to survey?

‌After we receive approval to administer the OYOF survey, we use a passive consent process whereby parents are mailed a letter informing them of the survey and its contents and given information on how to opt their child out of the survey if they wish. OYOF surveys are administered anonymously online during classroom hours to students in the 6th grade and above.

Approximately one month after their students complete the survey, the school receives a comprehensive report of their school’s survey findings and compensation for participating. This report provides schools with critical information about what substances are most commonly used by students attending their schools and the profiles of risk and protective factors impacting their students. School administrators, teachers, and prevention and intervention coordinators can use this information to request funding for additional resources, to tailor school programming, and to better understand the needs of their students.

What kinds of questions are on the OYOF Survey?

There are two groups of questions on the survey: core substance use items, risk and protective factors. Core  items include measures of frequency of lifetime, last 12-month, and last 30-day use for 25 separate items,  including alcohol, cannabis, nicotine products, and other illicit drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine, and prescription drugs.

We also examine related measures such as age of first use, 2-week binge drinking, perceived harm, perceived availability, peer use, and peer influence. Most of the core questions are written to match questions from Monitoring the Future, a national school-based survey of substance use in the general adolescent population.

We also add new substance use measures periodically, such as mode of substance use and new types of substances. For example, we have recently added modes of cannabis use (i.e., how students choose to consume cannabis) and types of cannabis products used along with their associated risk and availability perceptions as the risk for cannabis use disorder and other cannabis problems varies markedly based on these dimensions.

In addition to asking about the substances they use, OYOF asks about students’ risk and protective factors, with a special emphasis on strength-related measures and cultural resilience factors specific to American Indian* youth.

Although OYOF collects information about many common risk factors, such as peer use, mental health challenges, stress, and other adversities, our focus is on the types of factors that support reservation-area students’ resilience and flourishing. Some of these include use of positive coping strategies, positive affect, cultural identity, and community-mindedness.

This data provides researchers, health workers, and school officials with valuable information about the factors that are currently helping their students succeed and make healthy decisions. These measures are periodically exchanged with other measures in order to maximize the diversity of data available.
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Note: We do not ask questions related to sexual activity or similarly sensitive personal information. We are also more than happy to adjust the questionnaire to add or remove specific items, if requested.

How is OYOF data used?

After a school has completed the survey, the survey data are downloaded to our secure server, and cleaning and consistency checks are performed. A random numerical code is assigned to each school, so that no school or tribe can be identified within our data. A school is only categorized by the region in which they are located (Northern Plains, Northwest, Southwest, Upper Great Lakes, Southern Great Plains, Southeast, or Northeast). Individual school data is combined into an aggregated dataset at the end of each school year.

Our team of researchers analyzes data in several ways. We compute substance use rates by grade in order to examine trends over time and to compare rates to national rates from Monitoring the Future national data. These study findings are presented on this website, and findings for particular substances may be published in scientific journals. For example, a recent publication on national rates of nicotine among American Indian* youth, including vaping, is published in the journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

The National Tribal Behavioral Health Agenda advocates for strength-based approaches focusing on factors that drive positive functioning in Indigenous youth in spite of adversity and risk. Therefore, we use an eco-systemic resilience framework to guide systematic examination of substance use risk and resilience among this group of students. For example, we have found that school engagement is strongly associated with students’ cannabis use in the past month and family, and school and peer factors impact reservation-area adolescents’ likelihood and severity of binge-drinking differently depending on different intersections of their Native Identity and gender. More OYOF publications authored by Tri-Ethnic Center investigators and affiliates can be found here.

How is OYOF data shared?

We do not share an individual school’s data with any entity or person outside of that school, except for the tribe of the reservation on which the school is located, although we may share data compiled across multiple schools with other researchers or health care coordinators. In these cases, the OYOF data is never linked to any specific schools, tribes or communities, and we do not use any geographic identifiers (e.g. state, city, reservation, etc.) to identify schools other than region.

At the end of a funding cycle, as required by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health data management and sharing requirements, we make our data publicly available on the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP) website housed on the University of Michigan website. As noted above, schools are not identified at any level other than the region in which they are located.

About OYOF

How is OYOF data shared?

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About OYOF

Supporting the Health of Indigenous Youth

How is the OYOF study designed and who participates?

What happens after schools agree and are approved to survey?

What kinds of questions are on the OYOF Survey?

How is OYOF data used?

How is OYOF data shared?

Quick Links

Contact Us

What happens after schools agree and are approved to survey?