When I do a search why don't I see any results for the years of 1976 to 2003 for Monitoring the Future?

SAMHDA has purposely withheld the years from 1976 to 2003 of the Monitoring the Future (MTF) series from the search engine. The variables search function on the SAMHDA Web site searches through every variable's name, label, value labels, and question text within every data file. If these years of MTF were included in the search engine, the results could become extremely large and unmanageable.

If you are interested in a variable from an older year of MTF there is a good chance that a similar variable will show up in the results on one of the more recent years of MTF. You could then use the Cross-time Question Index to see if that question was asked during the older years. Another alternative would be to go to SAMHDA's online codebooks page. Even though these years were not put onto the search engine, an online codebook was created for every year, grade, and part within MTF just as it was done for every other SAMDHA study.