Welcome to ESPAD

ESPAD is a collaborative effort of independent research teams in more than forty European countries and the largest cross-national research project on adolescent substance use in the world.

The overall aim with the project is to repeatedly collect comparable data on substance use among 15-16 year old students in as many European countries as possible.

Before compiling the online ESPAD Application Form, we suggest you to carefully examine the ESPAD Codebook you can download here, which describes in detail the questions and variables collected in the different years of the study, according to the ESPAD TREND DATABASE 1995-2019 format.

In this way, you will be able to formulate a punctual request of the ESPAD data of your interest during the compilation of the Application form by using the variables’ naming adopted in the Codebook. Please, do not use ESPAD questionnaires to indicate variable names, when filling in the form.

The variables “School” and “Class” are not released for protection issues. However, considering the increasing request by the applicants, we decided to provide correspondent ‘cluster variables’ when requested, which will be generated independently for each request. This will ensure the database integrity and protection.

If requested in a specific application, the following variables will be provided:

“ESPAD Cluster School” = Random Number Identifying Students belong to the same School – Clustering: ESPAD_Year, Country and School

“ESPAD Cluster Class” = Random Number Identifying Students belong to the same Class – Clustering: ESPAD_Year, Country, School and Class

“ESPAD Cluster Level” = Random Number Compute using variables: ESPAD_Year, Country, School and Class.

According to the ESPAD rules for data use by ESPAD Researchers and NON-ESPAD Researchers, 2019 ESPAD data can be requested by ESPAD PIs only. After the embargo period (NOVEMBER 2022) it will be possible to request data of all ESPAD years included in the TREND DB 1995-2019. The submitted applications will be quarterly evaluated – in March, June, September, December. After the validation phase by the ESPAD Application Committee, an e-mail notification will be sent to you about whether or not your ESPAD data request is accepted and about the instructions to download the required dataset.

Submit Application

You can submit your ESPAD application by accessing the form on this website. Click on the “Application Form” label on the navigation bar or click here!