Feelings Towards

Drug Use and

Music Preferences
Gurjot Romana
Business Communications, Brock University
gr12pu@brocku.ca

Backgrond Information

Methodology
The subjects for this research were university
students from southwest
Ontario.
For the most part students
were aged between 18-23
with some outliers who fell
outside that range.
Gender is fairly even, if it is
consistent with the
university as a whole
females will make up 57%
of the population with
males making up the other
43%.
There was no equipment
used to conduct the
research aside from google
forms to collect responses.
This platform was chosen
for its easily accessible
platform which works
smoothly on desktop and
mobile. This ensured
respondents would not run
into any issues while trying
to fill out the forms.

Several popular genres was

and begin to try to get
rated on a scale of likeabilithrough as many as posty from 1-7 by each
sible in a short period of
respondent.
time.
The genres chosen were
To avoid this the survey
part of the STOMP scale
was kept short with 29
which tries to categorize
questions, only one of
the respondents
which was qualitative. The
personality based on what
tradeoff here was data with
types of music they like.
less depth, in exchange for
Respondents were also
more accurate answers.
asked what their favorite
Since the research dealt
genre is. This was done to
with recreational drug use
see if there was any
which entails taking subconnection between
stances which are not perfavorite genres, personality
mitted by the law questions
and views on drug use.
were designed to ensure
Respondents were
that respondents did not
randomly assigned from
feel like they were incrimithe pool of students
nating themselves.
enrolled in the class
Instead questions looked to
They were responsible for
find out what respondents
filling a certain number of
perceptions of drug use are
surveys each.
in relation to their music
One of the issues that could
consumption patterns.
have arose from this is that
students would get bored

Some forms of music are more likely to

make references to recreational drugs than
others.
The imagery associated with certain
music genres can also be related to
recreational drug use such as the image of a
rock n roll star who loves to drink or a
rapper that constantly references lean.
Music often reflects a glamorous lifestyle,
and artists are role models for many listeners.
This glamorization may lead to drugs
becoming something that listeners become
curious about or potentially become something they will experiment with.
Adolescents spend an average of 16 hours
per week listening to music which means
there is a lot of exposure to drug
references.

The stomp scale is a 14 item scale that

looks to categorize respondents into
personality
profiles based on their musical preferences
for 14 major musical genres.
The original study looked find out how
people use music in their daily lives.
The study found that people may use music
to regulate their mood
Based on this finding they concluded that
people often pick music to reflect their
current mood.
Their musical preferences will reflect what
kinds of music they are most often
listening, in turn this will tell researchers
what the respondents personality is like
based on their mood.

Research Questions
Do some types of music cause listeners to be more
accepting of drug use.
Is there any link between preferred genres of music and
feelings towards musics ability to influence teens.

Findings

65% Female
Rap was the most popular genre, other was second
Most participants listen to music with drug references
35% Male
Religious, Country, Classical and Folk were the least preoften or very often
Average age 21.3 years old
ferred genres respectively
Many respondents claimed to use drugs recreationally
More than 75% listen to more than 10 hours of music per All participants are ok with music that makes reference to
already, opinions were split whether music had an influweek
recreational drug use
ence on their usage
31% listen to 20% hours per week

Conclusions
The Goal of this research was to find out if people believed that music
has the ability to influence teens to use recreational drugs
My hypothesis was based on Cultivation theory. I believed that
increased exposure to music with references to drug would lead to
individuals feeling less opposed to the idea of recreational drug use.
I found that this was true to some extent but there were other who had
a high level of exposure who to music with drug references but they felt
that their personal drug use was not a consequence of this exposure

Future Research
Future research should look into talking to individuals directly about
drug use rather than
feelings towards drug use as a means of gaining a firmer grasp on how
much people are affected by

Reference
Christenson, P., Roberts, D. F., & Bjork, N. (2012). Booze, drugs, and pop music: Trends in substance portrayals in the billboard top 10019682008. Substance Use &
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Johnson, M. B., Voas, R. A., Miller, B. A., & Holder, H. D. (2009). Predicting drug use at electronic music dance events: Self-reports and biological measurement. Evaluation Review, 33(3), 211225. doi:10.1177/0193841x09333253
Parker-pope, T. (2008, February 5). Under the influence of...Music? Well. Retrieved from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/under-the-influence-ofmusic/
Vuolo, M., Uggen, C., & Lageson, S. (2014). Taste clusters of music and drugs: Evidence from three analytic levels. The British Journal of Sociology, 65(3), 529554.
doi:10.1111/1468-4446.12045
Wilton. (2010). The Labour Market Context of HRM. Retrieved from http://studysites.sagepub.com/wilton/The%20Labour%20Market%20Context.pdf
Yang, S. (2008, April 1). 04.01.2008 - new study finds glamorization of drugs in rap music jumped dramatically over two decades. Retrieved March 29, 2016, from Berkley.
edu, http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/04/01_rapmusic.shtml