Substance Abuse, Prevention And Student-Athletes
Substance abuse, prevention and student-athletes: An Annotated BibliographyJalen HurstUniversity of MississippiSubstance abuse, prevention and student-athletes: An Annotated Bibliography. Substance abuse has been going on for decades. It has only been in the past couple of decades that researchers and scientists have come to the realization that addicts addiction to drugs is both impulsive and a disorder. Alcohol, prescription and recreational drugs are all major substances that have been the biggest topic of discussion and it’s no surprise that these substances have become a huge problem on many college campuses across the United States, particularly among college athletes.
Researchers have suggested that this category of students are at the biggest threat of abusing drugs. My annotated bibliography has citations, summaries, and rundowns of eight sources that I have chosen from the exercise science literature to analyze the different views on how substance abuse is becoming a problem and how we can prevent it among our student athletes. It seeks to answer the research question, “How close are drugs linked to student athletes and how interventions/clinical can help lower the correlations. ”In my eight sources below are academic journal articles published between 1997 and 2017. Though one of the research articles is fairly outdated at least twenty year back, that particular source seems to be helpful in finding a solution to drug abuse in a time where the rate of drug use was very low. Furthermore, I do have a few articles that are cited in more up-to-date research, making some information key to the field’s knowledge and research of the topic. Lastly, a limitation in my annotated bibliography is that multiple sources are written by more than one individual, so there is a lot of mixed information in the article that explains the conclusions they came to. There are only very few things missing from this annotated bibliography and its sources that focus on how many drug users were addicts before arriving to college. I chose to omit these sources due to how my topic focuses solely on how this affecting those currently enrolled in college, not discussing how long people have been doing drugs. I only academic articles to find articles discussing my topic.
Their claim in this study was to examine how handled alcohol-related problems experienced by students. In order to examine the problem, they used sampling and telephone interview methodology from 401 college students attending a large southern California university as data after they were surveyed by trained research staff. The results that were found strongly supports that the traditional prevention strategies, such as providing food with alcohol, may have been effective means of reducing or protecting against alcohol-related problems. In contrast, other commonly espoused strategies like providing nonalcoholic beverages did not appear to have an impact on problems. The article is beneficial to my research because instead of going in depth about why binge drinking happens, it shows instead how you can prevent it from becoming a problem. Although, there’s relatively little research that has examined drinking contexts among college students, especially contexts specific to binge drinking events. A key limitation is the small sample size and although representative of the population from which the sample was drawn, these data are limited to a unique university and region. Future research into college drinking contexts would be beneficial from a nationally representative sample, specifically those who attend a party school. Cummings S. (1997). An empowerment model for collegiate substance abuse prevention and education programs.
Cummings (1997) gives focus on an empowerment method that has been shown as a prominent effect on prevention for substance abuse. Instead of using a lot of data, she instead views her empowerment model as a process in which she uses four regulations to having a successful prevention program as her focus point. In order to engage in the issue, the four guidelines that she used were insisting on huge participation from the target group, having patience for it to work over time, understanding how the person operates and having designs that allows the prevention programs go in depth with the problem of the users. The results found was that after following those guidelines, programs have been able to properly help those who are in desperate need.
Although the information provided is a little outdated, it is beneficial to use this because it shows that with proper steps, many other prevention programs can have the same success as them. Unlike them, a lot of other prevention programs can’t identify the ingredients for proper program success. The research gap in this article is that they do not account for is what some patients may need as far as drugs that doctors may have given them to stop their addiction.
Donohue et al (2013), in his article, focuses on student-athletes being at a huge risk to get involved in dangerous misuse of drugs and alcohol. Backing up their focus, they writes their hypothesis wondering how substance abuse with athletes has become a public health concern. They supports their claim by stating that “competitive athletes often report perceived pressure from others to attain optimum levels of success in multiple life domains, particularly sport performance and may lead to significant anxiety” (p. 99) This quote was further explained the conclusion that success has become a standard for athletes and they handle this anxiety by participating in risky behaviors, like substance use. Researchers dug deeper in this article in order to find methods that will lower the correlation between high consumptions of drugs/alcohol and student-athletes. After reading the whole article, I found that the research gap was that there isn’t any involvement that’s been found to slow down alcohol and drug use. There was some evidence that showed that shows how interventions worked more when the family members are more involved with the athletes.
This article was helpful because it shows that there is a huge concern that needs to be noticed and that concern is student-athletes feeling pressured amongst society to do well in their specific sport. There was some evidence that showed that shows how interventions worked more when the family members are more involved with the athletes. However, there is one limitation being that there is a lack of evidence that supports substance abuse treatments being modified to address the problem at hand, considering how it has become a big epidemic. Furthermore, these certain programs aren’t designed to manage drug and alcohol abuse or dependence. Ford, J. A. (2007). Alcohol use among college students: A comparison of athletes and nonathletes.
Ford (2007) indicates in his article that students who are involved in particular athletic crowds are more likely to engage in a variety of risky behaviors than those who hang around the same crowd that aren’t involved in athletics. His purpose of writing this article was to report how athletes are more likely to try extreme styles of alcohol consumption, binge drink at higher rates, and get drunk more often. In order to back up his purpose, he used data from a 1999 survey that researched the same subject, which contains information on over 14,000 students at 119 four-year colleges and universities in 39 states to measure substance use, primarily alcohol, and other health risk behaviors of college students. What was found was that those who are athletes, Caucasian, Hispanic, never married, and young with lower grades are the ones who are more likely to report binge drinking. I am using the information from this article because it argues that those who are surrounded with certain environments are more likely to intake more alcohol. The only limitation of this study that I found was the inability to measure the social norms of teammates, other athletes, and coaches directly. Measuring the norms regarding alcohol use by specific teammates or fellow athletes would’ve provided more information and a better picture of the athlete subculture. Lastly, there is no doubt that coaches possibly can influence the behavior of athletes, and it’s likely that if coaches created an atmosphere that is permissive of alcohol use then athletes will be more likely to view alcohol use as acceptable behavior.
Grossbard et al (2009) examined the role of attraction to one’s team in this article to predict alcohol and marijuana use among collegiate athletes. Attraction to team and alcohol-related information were gathered during an online survey and marijuana use-related information was gathered during a live setting as information to back up their research. Grossbard (2009) investigated the influence of attraction to one’s team beyond the influence of gender and perceived norms, and he used attraction to team as a moderator of these relationships. As far as marijuana use, male athletes reported greater marijuana use than female athletes, as perceived marijuana use norms were significantly associated with individual marijuana use. Male athletes also reported greater alcohol use than female athlete as perceived drinking norms were positively associated with alcohol use. However, the attraction to team was not very associated with alcohol use as much as marijuana was.
For my research, this article was useful because since performing well can contribute to individual and team success, building students’ connectedness to other team members may serve as a huge factor as to why marijuana use and alcohol-related are so huge among college athletes. Perceived norms have been a big factor and I believe that today if drugs weren’t that big among celebrities, then it wouldn’t be big problem on college campuses. The research gap was that there wasn’t any evidence showing as to whether these male and female athletes were already drugs users/addicts before arriving to their secondary education schools. Kroshus, E. , & Davoren, A. K. (2016). Mental health and substance use of sexual minority college athletes.
Kroshus and Davoren (2016) purpose was to discuss mental health and substance use of homosexual minority collegiate student-athletes in the United States, as compared with heterosexual college students and heterosexual student-athletes. Data was collected from 435,595 students at 423 institutions responded to the NCHA, (National College Health Assessment), survey to measure how much peer pressure was involved in their mental health and substance use. The results were simple and quite shocking after collecting the surveys. What was found was that there wasn’t really any significant differences in mental health between sexual minority male athletes and nonathletes; the same thing goes as far as their intake in substance use.
Participation in athletics didn’t appear to be associated with an elevated risk of negative mental health or higher dosage of substance use. I used this article because it could be used in an argument on whether homosexuality can affect athlete’s health across the United States. Also, it can be valuable in studying how stress from finding one’s identity can cause other problems for many across the United States. Two limitation was found in this article and it’s how it’s very encouraged to identify and quantify how certain experiences within or vies of homosexual student-athletes of the sport environment and analyze how those are related to differences in mental health and substance use outcomes when researching the same topic in the near future. The second limitation being that the results of this study could be completely different in regions of the United States where both the LBGTQ population is as popular as the sports. A bigger correlation would possibly be found with mental illness and substance use among homosexual athletes.
Unhjem, Flemmen, Hoff, and Wang (2016) purpose in his article was to highlight that patients with substance use disorder (SUD) suffers from several different health and psychosocial issues. They supports this claim by letting us know that unlike drug free users, these patients are “more likely to seek medical attention, with very high chances to have of having a cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, committing suicide, as well as traumas, falls and fractures. ” (p. 1) This quote just explains that when most drug users abuse drugs, it results in them only living at least 20–30 years less than the general population who doesn’t abuse drugs. These results were from 24 patients diagnosed with SUD from the drug, amphetamine, and they were categorized by their mental and behavioral disorders from their psychoactive substance use were included in the study from February to March 2013.
They all resulted in getting proper treatment while performing the study. The research gap in this article was that while the conventional treatment in this study did not have any effect on the physical variables, it can’t be excluded that other clinics may have more effective treatment programs. Therefore, it can also be questioned whether the results would have been different if they had included patients with other primary drugs other than amphetamine. Unhjem (2016) article was useful because it shows that with proper treatment, people who are diagnosed with SUD can get the help they need to get over their drug addiction. It can be helpful because it is possible that if many college athletes have drug problems, they can find the help they need with proper treatment from the best medical staff in their area. This information can be resourceful in my future research to provide how substance use can be treated, depending on your diagnosis.
The purpose of Veliz et al (2016) research was to highlight how this article suggests that athletes are at a lower risk of cigarette use and illicit drug use when compared to their nonathletic peers but have a bigger risk in engaging in substance use, especially when trying to hide their secret sexual identity in a social environment that is traditionally homophobic. They support their claim and go into further details in their research by dividing the study into four categories of whether they were a sexual minority athlete, heterosexual athlete, heterosexual nonathlete, or a sexual minority nonathlete was measured among 127,000 respondents. In order to conclude their research, they gathered up their information and realized that sexual minority collegiate athletes were at bigger risk of binge drinking when compared to either heterosexual nonathletes and sexual minority nonathletes but had similar results when compared to heterosexual collegiate athletes. Veliz et al (2016) target group were college students collected from fall semesters between 2008 and 2012 by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment.
In my research, it’s very useful to use this article because it addresses that peer pressure is a problem on college campuses. It’s easy to recognize that this is a problem because Veliz (2016) states that in the respondents of guys in the study, “sexual minority collegiate athletes had substantially higher odds of indicating being diagnosed or treated for a substance use disorder when compared to heterosexual collegiate athletes, heterosexual nonathletes, and sexual minority nonathletes. ” (p. 517) This simply illustrates how athletes participate in substance use quite often and how many people will engage in substance use if they feel like they’re against the norm when they don’t engage in using the substances. This could be useful in the future because I also have another article where homosexual athletes weren’t at any risk in substance use based on their identity. This could be great for an argument to see why the research between the two resulted in different conclusions.
