Alcohol use remains a prominent feature of American collegiate social life. Emerging technological developments, particularly the proliferation of mobile phone cameras and the easy sharing of digital images on social network sites, are now widely integrated into these drinking practices. This paper presents an exploratory study examining how 40 students on a mid-sized college campus in the interior Pacific Northwest incorporate these technologies into their drinking activities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Examining how pharmaceuticals are used to induce pleasure presents a unique opportunity for analyzing not only how pleasure is assembled and experienced through distinct consumption practices but also how mundane medicines can become euphorigenic substances.
Methods: Drawing on qualitative research on the non-medical use of prescription drugs by young adults in the United States, this paper utilizes Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to examine how prescription medicines come to produce pleasure.
Results: Our research found an indeterminacy of experience as individuals were initiated into prescription drug pleasures.
We examine the experience of boredom and its relationship to troublemaking and drug use among rural youth in southwestern New Mexico. We draw on qualitative research with area youth to describe they think about drug use and they situate it within their social circumstances. We then locate youth drug use within globalized processes affecting this setting, including a local economic environment with limited educational and employment opportunities for youth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContemp Drug Probl
January 2012
Recent trends in the recreational use of pharmaceuticals among young adults in the United States highlight a number of issues regarding the problematization of drugs. Two constructions of recreational pharmaceutical use are analyzed. On the one hand, categorical frameworks based upon epidemiological data are created by institutions and media and depict recreational pharmaceutical use as illicit in unqualified, absolute terms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubst Use Misuse
September 2011
This study examined the utilization of the Internet by young adults as a source of information for the misuse of prescription drugs. Collected during 2008-2009, the data presented here comes from semistructured interviews (N=62) conducted in a northwestern city of the United States through support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Previous studies characterize young adults as particularly vulnerable to online prescription drug information that analysts portray as having a significant, invariably detrimental, impact on youth drug use behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The increasing attention paid to community-based research highlights the question of whether human research protections focused on the individual are adequate to safeguard communities. We conducted a study to explore how community members perceive low-risk health research, the adequacy of human research protection processes, and the ethical conduct of community-based research.
Methods: Eighteen focus groups were conducted among rural and urban Hispanic and Native American communities in New Mexico using a semistructured guide.
J Am Coll Health
September 2010
Objective: Using a qualitative methodology, the author examined the sociorecreational use of pharmaceuticals in a collegiate setting.
Participants: In all, 91 college students from a public, 4-year institution for higher learning in the Southwest participated in this study.
Methods: The author conducted semistructured interviews between May 2004 and December 2005; they then audio recorded, transcribed, and examined the interviews for themes related to the sociorecreational use of prescription drugs.
Social science research on polydrug use among young adult college students is scant, adopts definitions of this practice that are often devoid of sociocultural context, and emphasizes a very narrow range of use patterns. This article, based on ethnographic interviews from a study of collegiate prescription drug misuse, expands this focus by offering a cultural analysis of polydrug use. Two specific types of collegiate polydrug use, simultaneous interaction and sequential management, are examined within a cultural framework that relates these practices to the expression of two complementary values--control and release.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn their recent article, N. Spillane and G. Smith suggested that reservation-dwelling American Indians have higher rates of problem drinking than do either non-American Indians or those American Indians living in nonreservation settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvaluation research pertaining to the development of assessment instruments that fully capture the facets of empowerment prevention perspectives among youth are sparse. With funding from the American Legacy Foundation, the University of New Mexico Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, in partnership with the New Mexico State Department of Health, developed a measure of individual empowerment. Drawing from the various bodies of literature in adolescent development, substance abuse prevention, and program/coalition building, a questionnaire was developed to capture facets of individual empowerment as it pertains to tobacco prevention efforts among youth within New Mexico.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMandates for culturally competent substance abuse and mental health services call for behavioral health providers to recognize and engage cultural issues. These efforts to incorporate culture typically focus on client culture, but provider views of culture can also influence the provision of services. Analysis of 42 semistructured interviews with behavioral health providers suggests that culture is considered by many to be an obstacle to help seeking and treatment of substance-abusing youth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlcohol abuse on college campuses continues to be a significant public health issue and health promotion strategies are being directed at changing the culture of collegiate drinking. From a qualitative research perspective such efforts remain uniformed since this area of research is currently dominated by large-scale surveys that illuminate little regarding undergraduate perceptions of alcohol use. This study describes results conducted on perceptions of drinking among college students, and discusses the implications these results may have for developing collegiate alcohol abuse prevention programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article describes how qualitative social science research has and can contribute to the emerging field of drug and alcohol studies. An eight-stage model of formative-reformative research is presented as a heuristic to outline the different ways in which qualitative research may be used to better understand micro and macro dimensions of drug use and distribution; more effectively design, monitor and evaluate drug use(r)-related interventions; and address the politics of drug/drug program representation. Tobacco is used as an exemplar to introduce the reader to the range of research issues that a qualitative researcher may focus upon during the initial stage of formative research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTobacco use by the young is one of the greatest public health concerns in the United States and is targeted by a number of prevention and control programs. A fuller understanding of the social and cultural values that youths attach to smoking is important in achieving focused, effective prevention strategies. Drawing on data collected through individual and focus group interviews, this article examines reasons that Hispanic and American Indian youths give to explain their smoking.
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