Friendship and social network among adolescent drug consumption

Abstract

Interacting with drug-using peers has been one determining factor for individual drugs consumption, however, the research that addresses it only investigated whether consumption is conducted by friends, without going into depth on the level of risk of drug using by peers and the social network. The purpose of this article was to evaluate how individual drug use is related to social connections with peers with three different drug use levels: not users, users without social adverse consequences and user with social adverse consequences associated to drug use. A correlational study was conducted, in which 1086 students took part, ages between 15 and 18 years. Two self-report tests were used to evaluate (1) the type of drugs used and (2) drug use problems, additionally, all participants were interviewed to obtain information about the social network of their class group using the socio cognitive maps method. As results was found that almost all adolescents have drugs user friends, and as more consumers there are in the teenager’s social network, more social problems were reported. Such results were discussed that drugs consumption increase teenager population because popular teenagers start drug use at first, which creates high expectative about such behavior emitted and made their peer imitate them, but in a more problematic way.