Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine - Essay Example

Many attitudinal questions are single responses in that respondents have to choose where they sit on a predetermined scale. They have to choose one response code that reflects their thoughts. Multiple response questions allow the respondent to offer more than one answer to a question (Hague, 2004). Key survey questions included whether the students had been prescribed or had used without prescription opioids, stimulants, sleeping aids (sedatives), or anxiety medicines. To determine if students abused drugs, the researcher relied on questions that asked whether the students had experienced drug-related problems like engaging in illegal activities to obtain drugs, having withdrawal symptoms, or developing medical problems due to drug use.

Questionnaire administration: The questionnaire was sent to the selected colleges and afterward the college authority made available the questionnaire on their college homepage and urged the students to take part in the survey. Analysis of data: The data was analyzed using SPSS. The demographics of the respondents were analyzed. A distributing table of the data was created with the data range. And afterward, various tools of central tendency like mean, the median was applied to the collected data.

The null hypothesis of the study was "College students using prescription drugs without a prescription are not prone to drug abuse" and the alternate hypothesis was "College students using prescription drugs without a prescription are prone to drug abuse" Findings: According to the results of the survey, 59.9% of the cases reported that they medically used at least one of the four drugs with a prescription. About 20% of the respondents reported taking them without a prescription for non-medical reasons. 39.7% of the college students who took part in the survey reported that they had used the drugs only by prescription. 4.4% of the cases of the study reported to have used medications but were not prescribed them. 15.8% of the respondents who participated in the web survey reported using some medications, both with and without prescriptions.

The researcher also found that students who reported using drugs without prescriptions were more likely to screen positive for drug abuse compared to students who never used them or who had only used them for medical reasons.