Nucci and Turiel explain that, during this period of life, individuals expand their ability to recognize and incorporate multiple, and at times conflicting, aspects of a single issue to form their judgments and conclusions. In order to illustrate this complexity of thought and offer insight into how adolescents conceptualize the issue, this study examined adolescents’ judgments and justifications about marijuana use. This study was based on the proposition that unveiling the factors adolescents use in their thinking and the coordination process involved in this process can provide insight into their judgments about specific issues. Given the instability of public knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes toward the issue of marijuana use and its prevalence among the adolescent population in general , this issue was selected as the topic of research for this project. Specifically, this study was an investigation of adolescents’ judgments and justifications about marijuana use through the lens of social domain theory. Through the use of open-ended questions asking respondents to evaluate the act and their reasons for the evaluations, the study was intended to illuminate how adolescents conceptualize marijuana use. Marijuana use was also compared to other more clear-cut social issues in order to demonstrate its more ambiguous nature. It was intended that the results of this investigation contribute to the social domain theory body of research,how to trim cannabis and provide insight into adolescents’ judgments about a complex social issue that is relevant to this period of development.
The data partially confirmed the hypothesis that adolescents would show inconsistent judgments of marijuana use. Though they did show a mix of evaluations, respondents indicated more favorable views of the act overall. When asked about the act generally, only 8% of the respondents reported negative evaluations of the act . Not surprisingly, positive act evaluations of marijuana were negatively correlated with responses that there should be a law prohibiting use. Significantly more respondents disagreed that there should be a law prohibiting marijuana use than those who agreed with such a law. Likewise, most respondents reported positive evaluations of marijuana use in the case that it was common practice to engage in the act. When stating their reasons for their evaluations to these questions, respondents most frequently referenced conventional, prudential, and personal domain justifications. Specifically, the Custom/Tradition, Social Coordination, Safety, and Personal Choice categories were most frequently referenced. Respondents also frequently referenced the medical use of marijuana. Justifications to item 1 were considered most representative of the considerations that respondents found to be most relevant to the issue. Based on their responses to this item, considerations about the medical use of marijuana, the safety of marijuana, and personal choice to engage in the act were most salient to respondents’ reasoning. The other items in the marijuana use item set asked respondents to reason about specific conditions such as legality and common practices, and justifications to these items often referenced such considerations. For example, justifications for item 2 frequently referenced the Authority category, justifications for item 3 frequently referenced the Authority and Age Contingency, and justifications to item 4 frequently referenced the Custom/Tradition category.
Notably, however, the Safety and Personal Choice categories were consistently the next most frequently referenced justifications for each of these items. This finding as well as findings regarding justifications provided for item 1 suggest that safety and personal choice considerations were paramount to this sample’s reasoning about marijuana use. This proposition is supported by results that likewise suggested that prudential reasons were most frequently referenced; this justification was significantly more likely to be used than personal or moral justifications, and the personal domain was significantly more likely to be referenced than the moral domain. Results confirmed the hypothesis that adolescents reason about marijuana use by adults differently from how they reason about marijuana use by adolescents. Respondents were significantly more likely to provide positive evaluations of marijuana use under the age contingency condition than when generally asked about marijuana use. There was a 23% increase in respondents’ positive evaluations of the act under the age contingency condition than in their general evaluations of the act. Furthermore, respondents who initially had uncertain evaluations or negative evaluations of marijuana use seemed to be influenced by the added age contingency placed on the act: respectively 75% and 77% of respondents who had initially provided uncertain/mixed evaluations and negative evaluations of marijuana use shifted to positive evaluations of the act under the age contingency condition. These results suggest that an age law for marijuana was impactful to their evaluations about the acceptability of use. Justifications to this item supported this assertion, as respondents often stated that individuals 21 and older are “mature” and “more responsible” and thereby better able to make decisions about engagement in these types of activities. Respondents also frequently compared marijuana to alcohol when responding to this item and stated that the two substances are similar and should therefore treated in a similar fashion.
These findings are interesting to consider in the context of timing of data collection for this study: The administration of the study took place nine months prior to the November 2016 election in California , which resulted in the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana for individuals age 21 and over . The timing of data collection may have played an influential role in respondents’ judgments about marijuana use. For example, it is possible that respondents were not only exposed to political advertisements regarding the legalization of recreational marijuana use. Respondents may have even participated in classroom or social discussions about the issue of recreational legalization. It is not possible to know whether and to what extent such factors impacted these respondents’ judgments about marijuana curing use in the present study. However, such potential influences are important factors to bear in mind when considering the present study results . It is noteworthy that, as mentioned, the age contingency condition yielded the most positive evaluations of marijuana use in this item set. These mostly positive evaluations of marijuana use under this condition suggest that the age of the user is indeed an important factor in respondents’ judgments of the act. Moreover, given that this legal age condition has components of both conventional and prudential considerations, these findings have implications for the social domains that the respondents seemed to find most relevant to marijuana use; that respondents were significantly swayed toward positive evaluations of the act under this condition indicates that respondents find the conventional and prudential domains particularly relevant to their evaluations. Domain reference results suggesting that respondents provided significantly more prudential and conventional domain justifications in their responses to the marijuana item set provides further evidence that these considerations were particularly impactful to this sample’s reasoning about marijuana use.Respondents’ conceptualization of marijuana use regarding criterion judgments was determined through an assessment of their general act evaluations of marijuana use and through questions asking about marijuana use given specific conditional factors . Response patterns suggested that criterion judgments associated with the moral domain were not applicable, as the vast majority of respondents did not generally evaluate the act as wrong, nor did their evaluations necessarily indicate that they think of the issue as independent of law/rules/authority or common practice .
These results contrast with results from the studies conducted by Abide et al. , Amonini and Donovan , and Kuther and Higgins-D’Alessandro , which suggested that participants frequently or primarily evaluated marijuana or drug use as a moral issue. However, as was discussed in the review of the literature, these studies did not distinguish prudential considerations from moral, conventional, and otherwise personal ones when asking participants to make their evaluations; participants were asked to classify issues within the moral, personal, and/or conventional domains only. The lack of prudential domain differentiation may have confused their findings, as participants may have been thinking in terms of safety and harm when evaluating substance or marijuana use as “wrong regardless of existing laws” or as “morally wrong” . Separating the prudential domain from the others allowed for more accurate inferences to be made from the findings of the present study than those of such previous research. The response patterns from this study further suggest that conventional criterion judgments were less relevant to marijuana use evaluations than other considerations may have been. Respondents provided similarly mixed responses when asked about the acceptability of use in the presence or in the absence of a law prohibiting use. This suggests that the condition of rules or laws against marijuana were not significantly influential to their evaluations . Context specificity also seemed uninfluential to their judgments. This was evidenced by results showing no significant shifts in respondents’ evaluations of marijuana use under the common practice condition proposed; a statistically significant majority of respondents who were asked to consider this condition maintained that use would be all right even if was not commonly practiced or accepted . Taken together, these results suggest that marijuana use does not seem to meet the criterion judgments found to be associated with the moral and conventional domains. The lack of applicability of the moral and conventional criterion judgments is in turn suggestive that the personal domain is most closely characteristic of the marijuana use issue. Findings suggesting that personal domain criterion judgments were prominent in respondents’ reasoning about marijuana are consistent with previous research likewise suggesting that adolescents primarily evaluated substance use within the personal domain .Informational assumptions are the reasons or evidence that individuals point to when justifying their evaluations of an issue . In other words, individuals’ understandings of an issue are based on the informational assumptions that they have come to associate with the matter, and such understandings are utilized when reasoning about it. It is often the uncertainties of the informational assumptions associated with non-prototypical social issues that give them their ambiguous character, and in turn result in inconsistent judgments of these issues. Results from this study provide evidence suggesting that informational assumptions about the harm involved in marijuana use were related to respondents’ evaluations of the act. Results indicated that the significant majority of respondents held informational assumptions that frequent marijuana use causes physical or psychological harm to the user. The hypothesis that informational assumptions about the harm of using marijuana would be associated with responses to general marijuana act evaluations was supported. Though small in number , all individuals who reported that marijuana use was not all right were more likely to report that use causes harm, implying that the harmfulness of marijuana use contributed their negative initial evaluation of the act. The impact of informational assumptions about marijuana use harm on respondents’ judgments is further supported by the finding that 74% of those who provided uncertain evaluations of marijuana use when generally evaluating the act also reported that frequent marijuana use causes harm. This finding implies that beliefs about the harm involved in marijuana use may have contributed to these respondents’ negative general evaluations about the acceptability of use. The reverse finding likewise suggested that informational assumptions about harm play a role in evaluation judgments about marijuana use: Beliefs about the lack of harm involved in use also had an impact on evaluations, as those who reported positive evaluations of marijuana use were less likely to report that marijuana use causes harm. Specifically, of those who said that marijuana use is all right, only 38% reported thinking that use causes harm. This is in contrast to the 74% and 100% of the respective uncertain and negative evaluators of marijuana use who reported that use causes harm. The impact of beliefs about harm on evaluations about marijuana use was further assessed through the manipulation conditions that followed the general question about marijuana use. It was hypothesized that, when asked about the acceptability of use under the condition that it is not harmful, respondents would be more likely to evaluate the use of marijuana positively. Conversely, it was hypothesized that, when asked about the acceptability of use under the condition that marijuana use is harmful, participants would be expected to provide negative act evaluations. Results partially supported these hypotheses. Respondents who reported that frequent marijuana use harms the user were significantly more likely to evaluate use as all right under the condition that it was conclusively determined to be safe for the user. However, the condition of harmfulness did not seem to have a significant impact on the evaluations of the acceptability of marijuana use by those respondents who originally reported that frequent marijuana use is not harmful.