Perceived incentives and consequences associated with illicit adolescent drug use: a comparison of specific and general expectancy concepts

Abstract

Several principles drawn from the recent literature regarding cognitive and interactionist psychology guided the current investigation of specific and general expectancy concepts and illicit drug use. Primary attention was focused on identifying particular incentives and consequences directly associated with illicit drug use, especially as such incentives and consequences appeared to represent an individual's specific expectancies regarding the drug-using environment. Second, such specific expectancy dimensions were compared with general expectancies (i.e., multidimensional locus of control) in an attempt to explore the relative contributions of each to understanding the dynamics of illicit drug use in an adolescent population. Responses to an extensive questionnaire regarding drug use experiences and a variety of social, psychological, and biographical variables were obtained from 820 secondary school students (grades 9-12). A series of principal components analyses were used to delineate several .different patterns of relationships concerning perceived incentives and consequences associated with illicit drug use. In addition, such dimensions were found to vary in both clarity and accuracy of description in terms of a theoretical rank-ordering of their conceptual proximity to experience. Multiple correlational and ANOVA techniques were used to: (a) determine the predictive validity of the general and specific expectancy dimensions, (b) compare the respective sets of expectancies regarding empirical relationships to delinquent and non-delinquent criteria, and (c) determine the discriminant validity of the specific expectancy dimensions and other social, personality, and environmental variables across groups of increasingly drug-involved individuals. The results indicated that the specific expectancy dimensions revealed in the current investigation appeared to meaningfully reflect a variety of incentives and consequences associated with illicit drug use. More important, however, was the finding that such specific expectancy patterns varied along a proximal-distal dimension with regard to experience, opportunity, and availability. The proximal-distal nature of specific expectancy associations was also upheld in terms of predictive and discriminant validity comparisons, where more proximal, or salient, expectancy associations were consistently more strongly related to measures of delinquent and non-delinquent behavior than either general or distal expectancy measures. The findings of the current investigation were discussed in terms of the: (a) potential, theoretical value of including perceptual measures of specific expectancy associations in broadly conceived investigations of drug-using behavior, (b) integration of such perceptual constructs into otherwise structural models of deviance, and (c) implications for future studies conducted according to interactionist guidelines, specifically in regard to the assessment of situational influence.