A Comparison of Attitudes of Parents and High School Senior Students Regarding Cigarette, Alcohol, and Drug Use

Abstract

This is a report of the similarities and differences found to exist between parents and high school seniors in regard to attitudes toward substance use and abuse. To our knowledge there has not previously been any systematic data reported in the literature on this question. While the Institute for Social Research’s (ISR) survey of high school seniors, class of 1979, reported the students’ perception of parental attitudes of disapproval of substance abuse [2], we are not aware of any other study that compared the attitudes expressed by parents with the attitudes expressed by high school students. The ISR survey reported that “there is rather little variability among different students in their perceptions of their parents’ attitudes: on any of the drug behaviors listed nearly all say their parents would disapprove. Nor is there much variability among the different drugs in perceived parental attitudes” [2].