Social norms of college students engaging in non-medical prescription drug use to get high: What’s sex got to do with it?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Relationships exist between perceived peer and own use of alcohol, cannabis, and tobacco, particularly when peers and participants are sex-matched. We investigated sex influences on social norms effects for college students’ non-medical prescription drug use (NMPDU). Methods: N = 1986 college students reported on their perceptions of male and female peers’ NMPDU frequency and their own past-month NMPDU. Results: Approximately 3% of students self-reported past month NMPDU, with no sex differences. In a linear mixed model, participants who engaged in NMPDU perceived significantly more frequent peer use. Female participants perceived more frequent peer NMPDU than did male participants, particularly when perceiving male peers’ NMPDU. Significant positive correlations were found between perceived peer NMPDU frequency and participants’ own NMPDU for all peer-participant sex combinations, with no evidence for stronger correlations with sex-matched pairs. Conclusions: While social norm interventions may be effective for college student NMPDU, sex-matching of these interventions is likely unnecessary.Emerging adults (18–25 years) show elevated rates of substance use relative to other age groups.1 Arnett JJ. Emerging adulthood: a theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. Am Psychol. 2000;55(5):469–480. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] Almost 80% of emerging adults have engaged in past-month alcohol use2 Simons-Morton B, Haynie D, Liu D, Chaurasia A, Li K, Hingson R. The effect of residence, school status, work status, and social influence on the prevalence of alcohol use among emerging adults. J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2016;77(1):121–132.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] and approximately 7% have a substance use disorder.3 Qadeer RA, Georgiades K, Boyle MH, Ferro MA. An epidemiological study of substance use disorders among emerging and young adults. Can J Psychiatry. 2019;64(5):313–322. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743718792189.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] In the context of the current prescription drug crisis,4 Davison C, Perron M. (2013). First Do No Harm: Responding to Canada’s Prescription Drug Crisis. Ottawa: Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. [Google Scholar] approximately 14.4% of emerging adults report past-year5 Miech R, Schulenberg J, Johnston L, Bachman J, O’Malley P, Patrick M. (2017). Monitoring the Future National Adolescent Drug Trends in 2017: Findings Released. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan. Accessed March 30, 2018. [Google Scholar] and 4.8% report past-month non-medical prescription drug use (NMPDU).6 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). (2014). Results from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHresultsPDFWHTML2013/Web/NSDUHresults2013.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2020. [Google Scholar] NMPDU rates among college students are particularly concerning. Stimulants, opioids, and sedatives/tranquilizers are the most common types of prescriptions taken non-medically among college students, and their past-year prevalence rates of NMPDU for each type of prescription drug has been reported to be 19.6% for stimulants, 17.3% for opioids, and 11.8% for sedatives/tranquilizers.7 Silvestri MM, Knight H, Britt J, Correia CJ. Beyond risky alcohol use: screening non-medical use of prescription drugs at National Alcohol Screening Day. Addict Behav. 2015;43:25–27. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2014.10.027.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] NMPDU has been associated with numerous adverse consequences among college students such as physical reactions (eg, stomach pain or vomiting), functional or cognitive impairment (eg, academic problems, feeling detached from reality, difficulties speaking), relationship issues (eg, causing emotional harm to loved ones), financial repercussions, dependence, or overdose.8 Holloway KR, Bennett TH, Parry O, Gorden C. Characteristics and consequences of prescription drug misuse among university students in the United Kingdom. J Subst Use. 2014;19(1–2):156–163. doi:https://doi.org/10.3109/14659891.2013.765513.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar],9 Siste K, Nugraheni P, Christian H, Suryani E, Firdaus KK. Prescription drug misuse in adolescents and young adults: an emerging issue as a health problem. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2019;32(4):320–327. doi:https://doi.org/10.1097/YCO.0000000000000520.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] The concerning rates of NMPDU and the severity and breadth of associated harms among college students highlight that this phenomenon warrants further investigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".