To: East Brookfield District Court

From: James Lascuola

Date: May 2nd, 2016
Subject: District Court Data Analysis

I write to you as a student from Nichols College. I was hand selected from a field of applicants in
my major to be placed into a class with nineteen of my fellow peers to analyze how effective
various resource centers are for those who are in these programs. I was assigned to a group of
two other members of my class to input and analyze data from your district court into the
statistical program IBM SPSS, which is a program used to chart, graph and compare data for
analysis. By charting the information of given categories like gender, age, and ethnicity, we can
try and paint some kind of picture of what kind of people use the resource center. The following
information is the findings my group and I found from using SPSS.

Straight from the start during data entry, I happened to notice that the age groups for participants
were primarily in their twenties, with an average age of thirty-one years old. When we came
together as a class to look at all of our collected data, we came to a collective agreement that it is
very strange for people around the age of twenty in the area to have a need to enroll themselves
into these programs. We as a class then noted this was especially odd because the residents in the
general areas seem to be a much older crowd. This was later chalked it up to the fact that drugs
are starting to catch on at younger ages as the years pass, which brings the age of addiction to a
much younger age. In the same general train of thought, we began to see large gaps appear in
terms of the diversity of those involved in the program. The first instance of this gap occurred
when we saw the difference in percentage between males and females in the resource center. The
gap of male to female was around seventy-six to twenty-four percent, which was not absolutely
terrible compared to the statistics of ethnicity. An astounding ninety-five percent of the group of
participants we sampled were Caucasian while the remaining five percent (two people of the
group might I add) were of Latino heritage. I have no clue if this large gap is due to a small
Latino population of the area, or if this happened by mere coincidence, but that was something
noteworthy that raised a red flag for me. We took a look at the amount suffering from disability,
which came to a close fifty-fifty split, but there was only one extra person claiming to not suffer
from disability. With the same idea, we also got to see the amount of people medically covered,
and of the twelve people that answered, all but one had some form of medical insurance. We also
got to see what the highest level of education was held by members in your program; these
people have either been to high school and left before finishing, have completely finished high
school, or have their GED, the latter of which ranking higher after we arranged the information
into a bar graph. We then arranged the given drugs of choice into a pie chart to see the most
popular drugs of choice. In doing this, we saw that there was not one, but three different choices
for the top drug of choice; opiates, cocaine, and no singular favored drug. Then we started to
look to see if any variable correlated with the use of drugs. To test this, we used an analysis
program in SPSS that allows us to be able to cross reference two different variables, and will
give a decimal in relativity to if the two variables correlate. Only one of our categories had any
correlation with drug use: disability. This does make sense since one of the top drugs of choice
was opiates, which are found in medication like painkillers, which is starting to become one of
the top drugs since they are to an extent not too hard to come by, both on the street and in
pharmacies.

Though we as a group were able to get some results, there was one major concern that kept us
from getting far. This major concern came during the section of our analysis when we charted
your data and large amounts were missing for participants. This issue became evident after we
had entered the data for the basic level of information (ethnicity, age, and gender) and entered
more specific information, such as their employment status, insurance, or drug of choice. This
issue became a major hindrance once it came time to input the data into charts to get a better idea
of what we were looking at. This became such a problem to the point that one individual had no
information at all under their profile besides their name. Even when we tried to do correlations in
our data, one section comparing drug use and ethnicity came back as inconclusive due to the
amount of missing data we were given.

In conclusion, I would like to put forth a few suggestions that I feel would be great for you to
potentially implement into your program. For starters, I feel that would be in the better interest of
your records to have some kind of application for the future participants to fill out as a way to
obtain all of their necessary information. If you used the format of applications, I also feel like it
would bring in a more diversified group into a group that is very much young, male and
Caucasian. This process may also rule out any bias on if any persons have been admitted to
rehabilitation before and want to try again, or if people have any kind of criminal record, and
they want to try making a change in their life. To pair with this suggestion, I would also like to
suggest forming a small group of people in your resource center, giving them the responsibility
for filing and organizing all of these records to ensure that there are no missing pieces of
information with your participants. Finally, I feel that it would be in the best interest of those
involved in your program if they are given regular interviews so you could track not only
whether the program is working for them, but also track their progress of rehabilitation. This is
not something that has to be done every week or something that makes the participants feel like
they are being watched and judged on their every action, but maybe every other week or monthly
just check in on them and what kind of progress they are making towards living clean. to Other
than these difficulties, analyzing this data was a very interesting experience in researching, which
was unlike any other academic experience I have ever had, so thank you for giving us this
opportunity by giving us this information that allowed us to analyze this data.