Associations of deviant peer affiliation with youths’ substance use disorder abstention motivation: The mediating role of perceived social support and the moderating role of collective identity

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to explore the mechanism by which deviant peer affiliation affects substance abusers’ substance abstention motivation and the mediating role of perceived social support in the relationship between these concepts. Moreover, we also investigated whether collective identity moderates the relations among deviant peer affiliation, perceived social support, and substance rehabilitation. The participants were 430 male substance abstainers who completed a battery of questionnaires. The Chinese versions of the Deviant Peer Affiliation Questionnaire, Motivation for Abstention Scale, Perceived Social Support Scale and Identity Orientation Scale were used. The results showed that all the dimensions of deviant peer affiliation were negatively associated with the dimensions of substance abstention motivation. Moreover, perceived social support partially mediated the relations between deviant peer affiliation and substance abstention motivation. Additionally, collective identity was a significant moderator of the relations between perceived social support and substance abstention motivation. These findings provide a clearer understanding regarding the impact of deviant peer affiliation and perceived social support on substance abstention motivation in individuals with substance use disorder.

Keywords:

• Deviant peer affiliation
• collective identity
• perceived social support
• substance abstention motivation

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical approval

The studies have been approved by the ethics committee of the School of Psychology at Jiangxi Normal University. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by grants from the National Social Science Foundation of China (19BGL230), and from Jiangxi Province Colleges and Universities’ Humanities and Social Sciences Planning Project (XL17103).