Predicting Teenage Beliefs Concerning the Harm Alcohol and Cannabis Use may do in Eight European Countries

Data are from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs (ESPAD) in eight countries (Sweden, United Kingdom, France, Malta, Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic) in spring 2003. Two scales were constructed, measuring beliefs that alcohol and cannabis harm people. Relationships of these scales with measures of parental control, parental attitudes, respondent's own drug use, friend's drug use, and gender were assessed within each country. Both at the country and the individual level, subject's own drug use showed strong inverse relationships with risk perceptions. Parental control and parental attitudes also showed associations with risk perception but these seemed largely mediated by the parental influence on subject's own use and by choice of friends. In countries with low prevalence of drug use the extent to which the predictor variables accounted for risk perceptions was lowest. Also the predictor variables showed greater associations with cannabis risk perception than with alcohol risk perception. For cannabis the explained variance in risk of harm varied from 8.1% in Sweden to 30.4% in the Czech Republic. For alcohol harm this range was from 3.1% in Bulgaria to 15.1% in Malta.