Qualitative Methods in the Study of Psychoactive Substance Use: Origins and Contributions—Implications for Substance-Use Prevention

Abstract

Curiosity about how people use drugs (Specifically psychoactive substances that alter feelings, perceptions, thought processes, and/or behavior through their action on the nervous system) led to pre-ethnographic accounts of these behaviors at least as early as 500 BCE. Circumstances of contact between people of different cultural traditions led some observers to record their observations of exotic drug-use practices in distant lands, especially the New World. Eventually, after establishment of formal social and behavioral science, some observers adopted highly systematic and exacting standards for these observations. Anthropologists began to describe drug-using patterns as part of holistic studies of entire ways of life, but later proponents of ethnography focused on patterns of drug use, identifying useful principles for controlling effects of drugs on public health. The need for accurate ethnography of drug use became obvious as the United States began to encounter widespread drug use. Anthropologists and sociologists have played major roles in defining danger and identifying strategies for reducing harm related to drug-use patterns in the United States. Although there is a long history of qualitative methods used to study the epidemiology of substance use that has had a major impact on our understanding of the behavior, despite their potential utility, their application to substance-use prevention has been limited. In this chapter the history and contributions of qualitative research to our understanding of substance-using behaviors are reviewed and the potential for informing substance-use prevention is discussed.