The purpose of this study was to further understand and explore the motivations behind college students’ misuse of stimulants in an academic setting, in order to develop means to combat its growing popularity. We hypothesized that students would be more likely to misuse stimulants if 1) they perceive SM to be safe, 2) they perceive SM to be ethical, 3) they are more extrinsically motivated in an academic setting, 4) they perceive their academic environments to be competitive, and 5) they perceive SM to be normative.
Participants (n = 172) were undergraduate students at a small, Christian, liberal arts university in Southern California. Participants were recruited from an online research participation management system that included students enrolled in a foundational psychology course. The online survey was anonymous and took approximately 15 minutes to complete. The survey questionnaires were administered online in the following order: The Demographic Form, the Academic Motivation Scale, the Perceived Campus Competitiveness scale, the Stimulant Use Questionnaire, the Modified Perception of Prescription Misuse Among Peers scale, the Perception of Safety of Stimulants scale, the Perceptions of Adderall Ethicality scale, and the Validity Question.
Descriptive statistics evaluated attitudes and perceptions of SM safety, commonality, and ethicality. Only 43.6% of participants viewed alcohol to be safer than SM. While only 10.5% of participants reported lifetime SM, 61.6% of students perceived less than half, about half, or more than half of students to misuse stimulants during finals week. Finally, only 35.4% of students actually viewed SM as academic dishonesty
