A Scale for the Measurement of Attitudes Toward Drugs

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Abstract
Recent studies of drug use and abuse have substantiated the need for construction of instruments that are specific to the drug problem itself. The- rapidly increasing incidence of addiction has necessitated treatment of drug abusers before a background of data on the etiology and dimensions of the problem has had time to accumulate. Certainly, the part that societal attitudes toward the drug user plays, both in determining public policies and in retarding understanding, has been overlooked to a great extent. Because the addict cannot be viewed apart from the context in which he is seen and treated, community attitudes must be considered. There have been several questionnaires, such as those by Greenwald and Luetgert (1971), Linn (1971), and Lombardi et al. (1968), primarily designed to collect descriptive data about the drug user. These questionnaires usually yield information about the user's background and history of drug taking. Few scales have focused specifically on attitudes toward drug use. Lorenz (1972) reported a scale that measured attitudes toward marijuana in conjunction with levels of dogmatism. Pattison et al. (1964) surveyed changes in public attitudes toward narcotic addiction by reviewing popular magazine articles dealing with addiction. Doctor and Sieveking (1970) compared attitudes of four reference groups toward drug addicts, utilizing 35 bipolar descriptive statements on a 5-point agree-disagree format. Schur (1964) in a study of 147 young people in a London borough measured attitudes toward drug users with a questionnaire giving the subject several alternative but nonscaled responses. One scale, developed by Goldsmith (1971) and described by Caffrey et al. (1971), consists of 23 statements about drugs and drug users. The scale in its entirety is part of an unpublished master's thesis, and Caffrey et al. selected 15 items for factor analysis using ninth graders as subjects. The highest factor loadings obtained were 0.57. Items deal with attitudes toward repression of drug use as well as toward a more liberal view of drugs. No items related to treatment or agency policy were used. For the most part, scales such as Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale (1970) and adaptations of Osgood's Semantic Differential (1957) have served to measure either a tendency toward opinionation or a general attitude toward specific concepts related to drug use. The purpose of this paper is to report the development of a Scale for the Measurement of Attitudes Toward Drugs.