This study examines the knowledge individuals use to make judgments about persons with substance use disorder. First, we show that there is a cultural model of addiction causality that is both shared and contested. Second, we examine how individuals' understanding of that model is associated with stigma attribution. Research was conducted among undergraduate students at the University of Alabama. College students in the 18-25 age range are especially at risk for developing substance use disorder, and they are, perhaps more than any other population group, intensely targeted by drug education. The elicited cultural model includes different types of causes distributed across five distinct themes: Biological, Self-Medication, Familial, Social, and Hedonistic. Though there was cultural consensus among respondents overall, residual agreement analysis showed that the cultural model of addiction causality is a multicentric domain. Two centers of the model, the moral and the medical, were discovered. Differing adherence to these centers is associated with the level of stigma attributed towards individuals with substance use disorder. The results suggest that current approaches to substance use education could contribute to stigma attribution, which may or may not be inadvertent. The significance of these results for both theory and the treatment of addiction are discussed.
The stigma associated with substance use is well known, but little research has examined stigma attribution, or the tendency to stigmatize, nor is there much cross-cultural research on the topic. We examine cultural models for the risk of substance use associated with stigma attribution in two settings: the United States and Brazil. Study populations of young adults are the focus in each setting. Using methods of cultural domain analysis, cultural consensus analysis, and the analysis of residual agreement, we find similar models in each society. There is a continuum from viewing substance use risk as a biopsychosocial problem to viewing it as a moral issue. In the United States, viewing substance use as a biopsychosocial issue is associated with lower attributed stigma; in Brazil, viewing substance use as a biopsychosocial issue is associated with higher attributed stigma. We argue that social patterns of drug use in each society underlie this difference.
This study examines the cognitive resources underlying the attribution of stigma in substance use and misuse. A cultural model of substance misuse risk was elicited from students at a major U.S. state university. We found a contested cultural model, with some respondents adopting a model of medical risk while others adopted a model of moral failure; agreeing that moral failure primarily defined risk led to greater attribution of stigma. Here we incorporate general beliefs about moral decision-making, assessed through Moral Foundations Theory. Specifically, we examined commitment to each moral foundation in relation to stigma attribution while controlling for the specific model of substance misuse risk. We found an interaction between the purity moral foundation and the cultural model of risk. This suggests that broad moral orientations, along with more specific understandings of substance misuse risk, combine to orient an individual with respect to stigma attribution.
Cognitive culture theory and the associated methods of cultural domain analysis and cultural consensus analysis have revolutionized the study of cultural sharing and variation. However, the ways in which these methods can be employed are still not widely appreciated. Our aim in this paper is to propose a systematic framework for investigating cultural models. We provide examples of ideal types of sharing and variation in cultural models, including monocentric cultural models, multifocal cultural models, and multicentric cultural models. This review will contribute to mixed methods by providing a roadmap for researchers interested in employing cultural modeling in their own work, but who may not have a well‐developed sense of the various ways in which it can be pursued.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.