Development and Validation of the Adolescent Sport Drug Inventory (ASDI) and Factors that Influence Attitudes among Adolescents

Project Description

The primary aim of this project is to develop and then validate the Adolescent Sport Drug Inventory (ASDI) among adolescent athletes from different cultures (UK, US, Hong Kong, and Australia) and then use the ASDI to explore maturational, environmental, and psychological factors, in three separate studies, which might influence such attitudes towards doping and doping susceptibility. On the whole, adolescents have been widely ignored within the doping literature (Backhouse et al., 2007). The fact that adolescents have featured sparingly in the literature is somewhat of a surprise, because adolescence has been widely accepted as a period in which a person's attitudes are formed (Harton & Latane, 1997; Prawat, Jones, & Hampton, 1979). As such, it appears that it could be crucial to understand adolescents' attitudes towards doping, in order to the develop interventions aimed at eliminating negative attitudes towards doping before they have formed and targeting individuals who may be susceptible to doping behavior.