A Comparative Study of Addicts and Nonaddicts on Dysfunctional Attitudes and Coping Strategies

Abstract

Substance Addiction is a serious physical, social, psychological, and moral disease that needs an aid of rehabilitation. Dysfunctional attitudes are one of the major psychological factors contributing to the onset of substance abuse. Addiction processes are being affected by patients’ beliefs and attitudes. Persons holding negative attitudes toward life imagine themselves caught in undesired and uncontrollable events predisposing themselves to diseases. Different coping styles can be successful in different problematic situations. The present investigation was conducted to examine the relationship between dysfunctional attitudes and coping strategies. In addition to this, the research attempts to study the difference between dysfunctional attitudes and coping strategies in addicts and non-addicts. It was hypothesized that addicts have high dysfunctional attitudes as compared to non-addicts. For coping strategies, another hypothesis was formulated that addicts used emotion focused coping strategies more as compared to non-addicts and non-addicts used more of problemfocused coping strategies as compared to addicts. In order to verify the above hypotheses a sample of Sixty (N=60) participants, from which thirty were addicts (N=30) and thirty were non-addicts (N=30) taken in the present study. To measure the dysfunctional attitudes and Coping Strategies; the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS-24) by Power et.al (1994) and Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ) by Folkman and Lazarus (1988) was administered respectively. The data were subjected to correlation, regression and ‘t’ analysis and the major finding of the study reveals that there is the difference between the dysfunctional attitudes and coping strategies in addicts and non-addicts and addicts hold higher dysfunctional attitudes as compared to non-addicts.