Personal Values and Substance Use in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Risk or Protective Factors?

Abstract

Background: Personal values are desirable trans-situational goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives and have been widely found to be related to people’s behavior. Objectives: This study aimed at investigating the relation between personal values and youth involvement in frequency of alcohol and cannabis use and problems related to substance use, comparing two groups of adolescents and young adults: 237 adolescents (age 14–19 years; 58.2% females) and 236 young adults (age 20–30 years; 78.8% females). Participants were asked to fill in an online self-report questionnaire aimed at assessing the constructs of interest. Results: The results showed that openness to change, despite being more prioritized by adolescents, was significantly positively related to frequency of cannabis use and problems related to substance use only for young adults. Conclusions: Implications for preventive interventions and further expansions of the study are discussed.

Keywords:

• Personal values
• adolescents
• young adults
• substance use

Declaration of interest

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available because of local legal and privacy restrictions (Italian Data Protection Code-Legislative Decree No. 196/2003). However, the raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript can be made available by the first author to qualified researchers upon request.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes

1 This scale was used with different aims and only with regard to the adolescent sample in Danioni et al., 2020.

2 Based on the very limited use of other drugs by participants (5.5% of adolescents and 6.4% of young adults), we considered the answers provided on the scale as referring to cannabis use, despite the use of the more general word “drugs”.

3 With regard to alcohol use, respondents report drinking each kind of drink as follows: Beer: adolescents M = 2.12, SD = 0.92, young adults M = 2.25, SD = 1.1; Wine: adolescents M = 1.57, SD = 0.86, young adults M = 2.25, SD = 1; Light drinks: adolescents M = 1.99, SD = 1, young adults M = 2, SD = 0.88; Liqueurs: adolescents M = 1.76, SD = 0.95, young adults M = 1.80, SD = 0.84.

4 We also carried out the analyses by using participants’ age as a continuous moderator variable. By adopting p < 0.01 as a conservative approach, we did not find any statistically significant changes with respect to age as a dichotomous moderator variable (0 = Adolescents, 1 = Young adults).