Drug Risk Behaviour among Malaysian Adolescents

Nor Hafifah Abdullah,Mohammad Nasir Bistamam,Md Azman Shahadan

doi:10.6007/ijarbss/v8-i12/5317

Abstract

Malaysia has been overwhelmed with the issues involving adolescent and drug abuse activity nowadays. The purpose of this paper is to conduct Pearson correlation analysis to see the relationship between seven variables in this data set. This current study involves 2894 data from some secondary school students in Malaysia (1357 male, 1537 female) from Kelantan, Pulau Pinang, Kedah, Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, Johor, Sabah and Sarawak with range of age 13 to 14 years old. Analysis shows that there is significant positive linear relationship between drug risk behavior and depression and negative linear relationship between drug risk behavior and social support from family, peer and school, family income and resilience. Further studies are needed to replicate this study by using more advance statistical analysis and at the same time further longitudinal studies assessing the interaction between these construct or variables are crucial at different culture background and adolescence development stage because this study only focus on early adolescence stage.

Highlights

Adolescence is a milestone in human growth and development as a turbulent period of transition from childhood to adulthood characterized by coexistent changes where it is a critical period of life in which a great deal of biological, psychological, and social changes occurs (Kurt & Ergene, 2017)
The population of adolescents in Malaysia is about 5.4 million, in other words, adolescents make up 19.2 percent of the population of Malaysia (World Health Organization, 2009)
The first group is the group of adolescents who have the characteristics of not active at school and low academic achievement while the second group characteristics was contradict with the first group characteristics which they were active at school and have high academic achievement

Summary

Introduction

Adolescence is a milestone in human growth and development as a turbulent period of transition from childhood to adulthood characterized by coexistent changes where it is a critical period of life in which a great deal of biological, psychological, and social changes occurs (Kurt & Ergene, 2017). Adolescence stage is a developmental stage that acquire maximize survival and reproductive fitness where risk-taking and subsequent drug experimentation during this developmental period lead to increase likelihood of developing a lifelong addiction, internalizing and externalizing behavior (Jordan & Andersen, 2017). As this phase is where an adolescent’s learning capacity to absorb knowledge, develop habits, and foster skills grow rapidly, this phase become the most vulnerable phase in developmental stage for them to drug abuse and supportive and positive environments are critical to their success (Turnbridge, 5 June 2018)

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Results