MEASUREMENT OF SELF-RECOGNIZED SOCIAL AND HEALTH THREATS IN ADDICTION: FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SCALE APPROACH

Abstract

The measurement of social and health threats poses a methodological problem. To preserve the validity and reliability of the measurement, the whole complex of these phenomena has to be discovered and covered by appropriate variables. Therefore, in our research, we changed the perspective from the measurement of the objective occurrence of the threat and instead focused on measuring the subjective recognition. In social sciences, the subjective perspective can be more important because the experience of threat is often more influential than objective recognition. Moreover, measuring the subjective perception of social and health threats from the respondent's perspective was used because identifying these threats is crucial in primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. This paper intends to analyze subjectively recognized social and health threats caused by substance abuse. We developed four-dimensional scales to measure the influence of these threats on our key areas of life: health, family, community, and economy. All these scales can be inconsequential analyses related to fundamental sociodemographic factors or any other factorial variable. In this paper, we show the results of the influence of age and gender on each measured dimension of self-recognized threat. The research was designed as a cross-sectional ex-post-facto study. All dependencies were statistically analyzed using a one-way ANOVA test, and dependencies where the calculated probability (p) was less than 0.05 were marked as significant. Results less than .01 and .001 were also recorded. A pooled bivariate analysis of the relationship of substance endangerment across the dimensions was examined using a two factor ANOVA with two factors (substance and dimension of endangerment). Results where p less 05 were considered statistically significant.