Doping Attitudes and the Use of Legal and Illegal Performance-Enhancing Substances Among Italian Adolescents

Abstract

Using retrospective self-reporting, rates of illegal and legal performance-enhancing substance (PES) use in the past three months among more than 3,400 Italian high school adolescents were obtained and estimated. The study focused on the extent to which these sociodemographic characteristics and illegal PES use were associated with adolescents' positive attitudes toward illegal PES use. Results showed that it is relatively rare for youths to report use of illegal performance-enhancing substances in the past three months, and that male, relatively older, and athlete students were significantly more likely to use illegal PES than their respective counterparts. The results also showed that illegal PES users and male, older, and athlete students held stronger attitudes favoring illegal PES use. Finally, results showed that those student athletes who reported having used legal PES in the past three months were 10 times more likely to also have used illegal PES than those student athletes who did not report having used legal PES.

KEYWORDS:

• adolescents
• doping attitudes
• performance-enhancing substances

Notes

*p < .01.

Note. For both types of PES (illegal and legal), the percentages of single PES use do not add up to the overall percentages of use, as students could indicate more than one PES.

*p < .01.

These overall percentages of PES use did not change substantially after including the six cases who reported to have used the fictitious filler drugs. In particular, the percentage of users of illegal PES changed from 1.5% to 1.7% (i.e., from 53 cases to 59 cases), whereas the percentage of users of legal PES changed from 6.7% to 6.8% (i.e., from 234 to 238 cases).