Adolescents' Reported Motivations to Use or Not to Use Alcohol or Other Drugs
ome African American scholars S insist that examining cultural values and social practices within a specific ethnic group is the most effective way to understand behaviors (Bass 1993; Blackwell 1991). They contend that the cultural values indigenous to particular ethnic groups may provide a vantage point to a more accurate interpretation of ethnic differences in drug use behavior. To date, the cultural approach to understanding adolescent drug use patterns has, unfortunately, been neglected (Botvin, Schinke, and Orlandi 1995; Miller et al. 1999). A cultural approach to adolescent drug use behavior entails investigating and describing a culture’s normative beliefs and its members’ perception that those beliefs are tied to cultural practices. For this study, we investigated