The proposed project will develop an archive of two kinds of products: (10 exemplary data sets containing up-to-date information on the incidence, antecedents and consequences of maternal drug abuse during the pre- and perinatal period; and (2) measurement instruments used to assess such incidence, antecedents and consequences for mother and infant. Powerful search and retrieval capabilities will accompany the archive. Selection of data sets and instruments to include in the collection will be guided by a National Advisory Panel of scientist-experts in the field. The proposed project should meet the following goals: (1) It will advance innovations developed by Sociometrics to facilitate data sharing in the social sciences, extending them to a field of research on maternal drug abuse; (20 it will include a new type of machine-readable product in data archive: measurement instruments; (3) it will stimulate use of the best biomedical and science research data sets on pre- and perinatal drug abuse, thereby amortizing generally formidable data collection costs over a greater number of analyses, findings, and insights; (4) it will encourage students exposed to these data sets in the course of their education to consider a career in drug abuse research; (5) it will bring state-of-the-art technology and data into the hands of research departments and individual scientists who could benefit from the collection.
