Peer Pressure Alcohol And Drugs Essay Research

Paper

From peer pressure to alcohol and drug problems adolescents face many difficult decisions in today s world. Adolescent psychologists study these problems and the way that adolescents react to them. The reason why they are studied is so that people can have an insight in to the mind of an adolescent. Many of the psychologists use the knowledge that is gained, from their research, to write research papers and books. Many of these books and research papers are submitted to different psychological journals. These journals are then sent out all over the world to many different universities and libraries to be enjoyed and analyzed by all. The point of this paper is to examine one of these psychological journals and find out about what information is contained within it.

The journal entitled Adolescence focuses on adolescent thought and their actions. The main purpose for the journal is to inform people of the Physiological, psychological, psychiatric, sociological and educational aspects of the second decade of human life. What this basically means is that the journal was created to study all of the aspects of an adolescent human being. The journal contains articles that have been written by psychologists who have a PhDs. from top universities around the world. Parents, educators and other psychologists use these articles and book reviews to give them a better view into the adolescent psyche. The journal Adolescence articles pertain to, among others, adolescent-peer relations, adolescent drug and alcohol abuse and child welfare.

Many psychological authors and professors submit books and articles to the journal. The way that the authors submit there work is achieved by two different means. An author of a research paper must create an abstract of their research paper and send it along with a self-addressed envelope to the main office of the journal. If the author is lucky he/she will receive a reply in a couple of weeks requesting that their paper be sent to the journal in order to be printed in an upcoming issue. For a book to be reviewed all that the author has to do is send the book to the journal and hope that it is reviewed and included in an upcoming issue.

The name of the article that was chosen is Image Advertisements for Alcohol Products: Is Their Appeal Associated with Adolescents Intention to Consume Alcohol. The authors of this article are Ruth W. Edwards and Kathleen J. Kelly. Ruth Edwards is a research scientist at the Tri-Ethnic Center for Drug Abuse Prevention at Colorado State University. She also has a PhD in psychology. The other author, Kathleen Kelly, is a professor in the college of business at Colorado State University. This article is setup in a research paper format that spans across thirteen pages in the journal. This article is considered to be a research paper because the data and experiments contained within it suggest that it is research data.

The basis that the authors had for this article was to determine if image alcohol ads influenced adolescents to drink more than product advertisements. The way that they wanted to accomplish this task was to run experiments to try and see how the advertisements affected the choices of the adolescents. The authors found a test group that consisted of 376 seventh graders, 376 ninth graders and 315 eleventh graders. These adolescents were shown both image and product advertisements. After the advertisements were shown, the students had to answer a series of questions based upon their feelings of the advertisements. These answers were then analyzed and ranked based upon the student s classification. What was discovered is that adolescents chose the image advertisement over the product advertisement. What this drives people to believe is that teenagers drink to try to fit the image that is perceived in the advertisement.

Psychological journals tend to be listed in the reference section differently than other sources. They must be cited using the APA (American Psychological Association) standard for citing journals. This journal article would be cited like:

Kelly, K. J., Edwards, R. W. (1998). Image Advertisements for Alcohol Products: Is Their Appeal Associated with Adolescents Intention to Consume Alcohol? Adolescence, 33, 47-57.

This is the way that the APA says that psychological journals are cited.