Boston Fights Drugs Case

Boston Fights Drugs

The current situation is there is sort of a drug epidemic happening in Boston amongst the school-going population, which has resulted in around 1000 drug trafficking arrests in the Boston area. It is estimated that the drugs seized have a worth of at least $250,000,000 which is definitely a huge problem. However, of those drugs seized, it is believed that it only constitutes about 5-10% of the total drug volume in the area. With this estimated 90-95% of drugs believed to still be in the streets, it’s expected that a crack epidemic will soon spread in Boston. The students believe the current anti-drug ads that are currently in place are not at all effective, and something should be done. The top three anti-drug programs that are believed to best would be enforcement, education, and communications mediums. The research question to be solved is to determine which anti-drug program would get the word out and be most effective to reach the target audience of the youth in the Boston area. To figure out what they are looking for, 3 research methods should be decided upon. That would be between quantitative surveys, focus group discussions, or one-on-one interviews. Amongst the three, I feel the focus group discussions would dish out the best results, given the $20,000 budget that the students have. Pros to the focus group would be being face-to-face with participants, moderator guiding discussion, recorded for future reference/analysis, and researcher can get any non-verbal traits/responses in person from participants. Cons would be the cost of moderator, influence of peers in discussion, time consumption, and not getting quantitative data as one would get with a survey. However, with focus group, the cost:data received ratio is far greater than the other two options.