What’s your ‘vice?’: a combined approach to drugs and other addictive substances and activities

Abstract

A person’s use of addictive substances is generally approached one drug at a time. However, individuals readily report use of many drugs, and interestingly, individuals may also include addictive behaviors or activities (e.g. sex, gambling, computer use or shopping) as being problematic. There is not currently a brief assessment to measure both individuals’ use of drugs and their engaging in addictive behaviors in a single questionnaire; though, one might facilitate scholarly understanding of shared addiction processes and might aid increasingly burdened healthcare systems. The main purpose of this work is to offer a preliminary examination of a brief combined assessment of both drug use and addictive behaviors. Specifically, we asked a sample of n = 306 and a replication sample of n = 173 individuals from the general public to report their ‘choice’ or desired drugs and behaviors, which we termed their ‘vices’, in a single assessment. Findings showed that individuals readily reported having ‘vices’; and individuals reported an average of between 7.09 (SD = 2.66) to 8.09 (SD = 2.52) ‘vices’. Furthermore, a combined approach yielded adequate interitem reliability (Sample 1 α = 0.77, Sample 2 α = 0.79) and construct validity; also, use of the all-encompassing term ‘vices’ did not appear to affect participants’ reporting on other validated measures of drug use. Combined drug and behavior assessments might engage resistant patients and may aid in patient-centered care and lifestyle discussions. Also, offering individuals the opportunity to ‘compare and contrast’ their drugs and addictive behaviors may direct future investigation into cognitive aspects of shared addiction processes.

Keywords:

• Addictive behaviors
• drugs
• vices

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Maddie Lemal-Brown and Federico Elizondo for their assistance in data collection. We would like to thank Catherine Bagwell, PhD, for her advice on writing. We also would like to thank our reviewers for their extremely helpful comments, and their patience and guidance.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For both samples, the scales for this assessment are ratings, rather than rankings. Though ranking scales would be technically more of a ‘compare and contrast,’ it would be difficult to force individuals to rank these items from first place to 22nd place. Instead, it is more useful to offer an organic ‘compare and contrast’ in which participants give higher ratings to items more desired (or liked or wanted). This also allows researchers to better determine how the items ‘compare and contrast’ on aggregate and individual levels.