Alcohol and substance use in young population: A developmental approach
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Abstract
To expand the research on alcohol and substance use in young populations, the studies included in the dissertation will look at the problem from various perspectives. The first study used an exploratory qualitative approach to provide insights about alcohol and substance use in rural settings in India. A total of 13 semi-structured face-face interviews were conducted with the non-college going substance users of age 18-25 years in the Northern region of India (Punjab). Participants were asked open-ended questions about their experiences with substance use and about the services they believed would be beneficial for a rural population. The second study of the dissertation examined the factors associated with drinking and substance use using longitudinal secondary data sets (a longitudinal national dataset) which would help to investigate the problem in different contexts. It is anticipated that these studies will help in identifying the association of multiple individual and contextual factors with substance use from a developmental perspective and will also help to fill in gaps in the literature on individual experiences with alcohol and substance use from a qualitative lens. Using a mixed method approach, the dissertation studies will advance the field of research and provide the researchers, school counselors, and policy makers possible ways to address these issues. Such evidence may help in designing the appropriate strategies to ameliorate the problems.