Characteristics and social representation of ecstasy in Europe - Irefrea

the cases collected of ecstasy users. The sociodemographic variables also act todescribe the samples. Certainly the world of young people is not a homogenous one inall cities and countries. To have descriptive data of the facts, however minimal, alsofacilitates reading the results which we obtained from other parts of the questionnaire.As these are not representative samples of each city, the conclusions are provisional.We can not say with certainty that the existence of a greater number of people of a highsocial level is a result of the sociocultural differences inherent in each country or a resultof sampling errors. We are adopting the same attitude as that in a recently completedwork in 12 western countries studying delinquency: “If the objective is to compare theindices of national delinquency, then representative samples are necessary. However, ifwe are interested in explaining some of the differences among countries, we can selectsmaller local samples” (Junger-Tas et al. 1994). Actually, samples are better structuredin the present IREFREA study than in the one already alluded, probably because of thepast experience of IREFREA in similar investigations, a higher uniformity in thenational research groups and that the objectives are more clear and concrete.We start now to compare the city samples relying on the followingsociodemographic variables: Age, sex, civil status, study level, current occupation,economical status and other variables connected with family relationship and religion.This analysis of the five European cities will give us a certain vision of the similaritiesand differences of each sample, and will help us to read the data referring toconsumption characteristics and scale results.We have used the total data of each city sample and only in the case of somevariables we have separate the data between consumers (C) or non-consumers (NC).RESULTSThe total sample for the five cities that participate in the project, is of 1.627individuals. The distribution of the sample according the main variables is at follows:AGECOIMBRA MODENA NICE PALMA UTRECHTMean 23,11 21,85 24,16 22,40 24,4Median 23,00 21,00 23,00 21,00 24,0Standard Deviation 02,70 04,02 05,60 04,06 05,2M-Estimator (Huber) 22,90 21,20 23,00 21,56 23,6As we explained in the sample design (chapter 3), it was decided 18 should be theminimum age because of two reasons: at universities it would be impossible to findyounger people and, following some data collected in the bibliography referred toecstasy in the different countries, the age for starting its consume is usually around 18or over.44