Jacob Curtis and Sam Hardy, Department of Psychology
Adolescent sex and alcohol use are issues today in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2012), about a third of high school students report having had sex in the previous three months, and 79% of twelfth graders have drunk alcohol at least once in their lifetime. There has been a cost for society. Teen childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers $10.9 billion in 2008 (The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 2011), and underage drinking cost Americans over $62 billion in 2010 (Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center, 2011).
Most of the research surrounding teen risk behaviors like sex and alcohol use has focused on the contribution of risk and protection factors like peers, parents (Spoth, Redmond, Hockaday, & Yoo, 1996) gender, income, and family substance abuse history (Stone, Becker, Huber & Catalano, 2012). However, this approach only focuses on factors outside the individual and does not consider the teen’s explicit reasons for participating or not participating. So, the teen’s reasons are largely unknown. The current study, instead of focusing on external reasons to explain adolescent sex and alcohol use, used self-determination Theory (SDT) to construct a measure of adolescent’s internal reasons for abstaining. According to SDT, instead of being will-less objects controlled by programming and their environment, humans actively control their lives by their attitudes and motivation (Deci & Vanteenkist, 2004). Proponents of the theory believe there is a scale of how motivated an individual is with a continuum from the lower end of more controlled motivations such as punishments, rewards, and guilt, to the higher end of more autonomous motivations such as values and identity (Deci & Vanteenkist, 2004). We hypothesized the more autonomous motivations will more strongly correlate with abstinence than the lower controlled motivations.
We created our Sex and Alcohol scales by starting with a large pool of items and narrowing to the best. We started by creating 199 items to capture motivation for abstaining from having sex and an additional 199 for capturing motivation to abstain from alcohol. From the initial pool, we reduced to the best 77 by consulting with experts in self-determination theory. We then piloted the surveys and reduced from that to the best 24 per scale based on descriptive qualities (skew, kurtosis, standard deviation), CFA loadings, and whether items correlations with scales or not.
Results supported our hypothesis. For the alcohol scale, more autonomous motivations were strong predictors of underage drinking (β = -.493, p = .00), while controlled motivations (external and introjected) were not as strong (β = -.073, p = .105; β = -.118, p = .01). For the sex scale, we saw a similar pattern. Autonomous motivations were strong predictors of teen sex (β = -.53, p = .00), while controlled motivations were not (β = -.21, p = .03; β = -.37, p = .01).
The final scales with 24 items each is a useful tool for understanding and promoting abstinence. It will soon be published and others will be able to use it for sex and alcohol or tweak it to measure motivations for other adolescent behaviors.
References
Andrea L. Stone, Linda G. Becker, Alice M. Huber, Richard F. Catalano Review of risk and protective factors of substance use and problem use in emerging adulthood Addictive Behaviors, Volume 37, Issue 7, July 2012, Pages 747–775 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2012.02.014
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance—United States, 2011. Surveillance Summaries. MMWR 2012;61 (No. SS- 4). http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss/ss5905.pdf (Eaton DK, Kann L, Kinchen SA, et al. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance—United States, 2009. CDC Morb Mort Surveil Summ 2010;59(SS-5):1–148. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/ss/ss5905.pdf (2012)
Deci, E., & Vansteenkiste, M. (2004). Self-determination theory and basic need satisfaction: Understanding human development in positive psychology. (Vol. 27, p. 1). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester.
Spoth, R., Redmond, C., Hockaday, C., & Yoo, S. (1996). Protective factors and young adolescent tendency to abstain from alcohol use: A model using two waves of intervention study data. American Journal of Community Psychology, 24(6), 749-70.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (2011). Counting it up, the public costs of teen childbearing: Key data. Retrieved from http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/costs/pdf/counting-it-up/key-data.pdf
Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center (2011). Underage drinking costs. Retrieved from the Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center (UDETC) website: http://www.udetc.org/UnderageDrinkingCosts.asp