Developing the public attitudes about addiction instrument

Abstract

Using a series of three studies, this project developed an addiction attitudes instrument for use in the general population and completed a preliminary analysis of the moderators of addiction attitudes. The final 54-item instrument has five subscales representing five models of addiction theory: Moral Model, Nature Model, Psychological Model, Sociological Model, and Disease Model. These models differ in beliefs about abuse and addiction aetiology, rationale for behaviour and prognosis for change. Development of the instrument included an inductive, ground-up approach using focus group participants from metropolitan areas in a western US state, and a deductive, top-down approach with experts in the fields of survey development, attitudes and addiction providing input in generating the survey item pool. University students and a sample of state residents tested the draft instrument. Analysis of the moderators of attitudes about addiction suggested that gender, age, education, religious beliefs and addiction treatment history are important predictors of attitudes.

• Attitudes about addiction
• disease model of addiction
• moderators
• moral model of addiction
• nature model of addiction
• psychological and sociological model of addiction

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

¹Note: The criterion for deletion due to bias in Study 3 (>1 SD above the mean) was more stringent than in Study 2 (>2 SD above the mean) as an extra precaution against biased results that may occur with panel participants (Dillman, Smyth, & Christian, 2009, p. 346).

²To simplify descriptive statistics, age was recoded into three age groups based on SAMHSA’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health classification (young adults: 18–25; adults: 26–49; older adults: 50 and older).

³Refer to Appendix A for review of the full instrument.

⁴The unstandardized coefficients appear unusually large for the Psychology and Sociology Attitude scales, because the DV used were the transformed (squared) variables.

*Participants responses based on a 7-item scale: 1 (Strongly Disagree), 2 (Disagree), 3 (Somewhat Disagree), 4 (Neither Disagree nor Agree), 5 (Somewhat Agree), 6 (Agree) and 7 (Strongly Agree). Subscales: P = Psychology Model; M = Moral Model; N = Nature Model; S = Sociology Model; D = Disease Model.