Vermont Center on Behavior and Health, Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jun 30;19(13):8075. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19138075.
(1) Background: Young people engage in addictive behaviors, but little is known about how they understand addiction. The present study examined how young people describe addiction in their own words and correlations between their definitions and substance use behaviors. (2) Methods: Young adults (n = 1146) in the PACE Vermont Study responded to an open-ended item “what does “addiction” mean?” in 2019. Responses were coded using three inductive categories and fifteen subcategories. Quantitative analyses examined correlations between addiction theme definitions, demographics, and substance use behaviors. (3) Participants frequently defined addiction by physiological (68%) and psychological changes (65%) and less by behavioral changes (6%), or all three (3%); young adults had higher odds of defining addiction as physiological or behavioral changes than adolescents. Participants who described addiction as “psychological changes” had lower odds of ever electronic vapor product use (OR 0.75, 95% CI 0.57−1.00) than those using another definition, controlling for age and sex. (4) Perceptions of addiction in our sample aligned with existing validated measures of addiction. Findings discriminated between familiar features of addiction and features that may be overlooked by young adults. Substance users may employ definitions that exclude the symptoms they are most likely to experience.
(1) 背景：年轻人有沉溺行为，但人们对他们如何理解成瘾知之甚少。本研究考察了年轻人如何用自己的语言描述成瘾，以及他们的定义与物质使用行为之间的相关性。
(2) 方法：2019 年，PACE 佛蒙特州研究中的青年成年人（n=1146）对一个开放式项目“‘成瘾’是什么意思？”作出回应。使用三个归纳类别和十五个子类别对回复进行编码。定量分析考察了成瘾主题定义、人口统计学特征和物质使用行为之间的相关性。
(3) 参与者经常通过生理（68%）和心理变化（65%）来定义成瘾，而较少通过行为变化（6%）或三者（3%）来定义；与青少年相比，年轻人更有可能将成瘾定义为生理或行为变化。与使用其他定义的人相比，将成瘾描述为“心理变化”的参与者，曾经使用过电子烟的可能性更低（OR 0.75，95% CI 0.57-1.00），这一结果在控制了年龄和性别后仍然成立。
(4) 我们的样本中对成瘾的看法与现有的成瘾验证测量方法一致。研究结果区分了成瘾的常见特征和年轻人可能忽视的特征。物质使用者可能会采用排除他们最有可能经历的症状的定义。
