Research methodology: principles, approaches, and applications

Drug Abuse in Children and Adolescents

Study Design: Survey

Population sample: Cross-section of randomly selected students (ages 12 to 18) from public and private schools from all fifty states

Prescription drug use

Survey method: Series of demographic questions, yes/no questions about prescription drug use and abuse, illegal drug use and abuse, and attitudinal drug survey, scaled 1 (disagree strongly) to 5 (agree strongly)

Explanation of methods

Prescription drug abuse is on the rise amongst adolescents today. Rates of marijuana use, once the drug of choice of young teens, are now rapidly being overtaken by rates of drug use and abuse (Teens and prescription drugs, 2007, Office of Drug National Drug Control Policy, p.4). Teens are more likely to get addicted than adults to these medications, despite the fact that many of the medications that are abused are only prescribed for adults, such as prescription opiates. Anecdotally, it is suggested that a desire for 'getting high' has little to do with this spike in abuse, rather teens are using these drugs to self-medicate through the acts of daily life, such as coping with school pressures, dealing with anxiety, staying up to work on homework late into the night, and sleeping (Teens and prescription drugs, 2007, Office of Drug National Drug Control Policy, p.5).

Designing an effective descriptive research study to shed light upon this disturbing trend could deploy a variety of methods, but a survey would gage the widest selection of students and allow for some demographic 'control' of errors through the largeness of the numbers selected. Questions the study could address would involve the demographics of the typical abuser of prescription drugs, types of prescription drugs abused, extent to which the drugs were used (length of time of abuse and frequency), and also usage rates of prescription drugs in the household at large. A final question might be if prescription and illegal drug use are correlated to any degree. In other words, do teens of a certain profile gravitate towards one or the other and if so, why? Again, only surveying a large amount of users and non-users could provide insight into this problem.

A cross-section of confidential surveys submitted to teens across the nation ages 12 to 17 would first solicit information about age, gender, household income, race, GPA, rates of use of prescription and illegal drugs for non-medical purposes, and also drug use of parents in the home for legal and illegal purpose. It might be expected that prescription drug abusers were of a higher income level than users of solely illegal substances, although it is unclear from previously existing literature that nonusers are from a higher demographic group than abusers of prescription medications alone.

In terms of specific drugs used, stimulant medications like Ritalin and Adderall might be attractive to students with high GPAs and high levels of expressed achievement given that these drugs enable students to study longer, rather than to 'check out' of reality (Harmon 2005, p.1). These students might also have more compunction or logistical difficulties in obtaining hard or soft illegal drugs, but still have access to prescription medication from their parents' medicine chests or from the medicine supply of friends who do not use all of their prescribed painkillers or ADHD medication.

While previous studies have indicated that parental use of prescription drugs facilitates addiction through availability, it would also be valuable to see if parental use of such drugs normalizes seeking pharmaceutical solution to problems on a psychological level. This could be determined through an attitudinal questionnaire following the fill-in-the-blank yes/no demographic questionnaire in the survey. The attitudinal questionnaire can prompt agreement to disagreement with statements on a 1-5 scale such as: "Because they are prescribed by doctors to some people, prescription medications are not as dangerous as illegal drugs." "I feel less guilty about taking prescription drugs, even though they are not prescribed to me, because they are not illegal for everyone." Or "I feel that because my parents take these drugs, they cannot be entirely bad for me."