Quantitative Methods for Estimating the Size of a Drug-Using Population

Abstract

The author describes several of the most important quantitative procedures for estimating the size of an unobserved or partially observed population, with specific application to the estimation of the prevalence of drug use. The methods discussed include synthetic estimation, truncated Poisson estimates, multiple-capture surveys in both closed populations (the capture-recapture model and log-linear models) and open populations (the Jolly-Seber model and Markov models), and, more briefly, system dynamics models.