Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

My proposed project involves the development and validation of a scale to measure attitudes toward the nonmedical use of prescription drugs to enhance cognitive performance in healthy individuals (i.e. individuals who have not been diagnosed with a cognitive disorder or a learning disability). A number of ethical concerns have been raised about nonmedical use including concerns about fairness and long-term safety of drug use in healthy people, and the potential of such drugs to change fundamental aspects of who we are as human beings (Metzinger & Hildt, 2011; Sandberg, 2011). Researchers who have examined public attitudes have used their own measures, making it difficult to compare the results from different studies. Having a valid and reliable scale to measure public attitudes available to researchers would facilitate the accumulation of knowledge in this area. Four hundred and fifty university undergraduates have already completed a 90 item version of the scale and principal components analysis will be performed on this data set to determine the underlying structure of the scale and to reduce the number of scale items to approximately 45 items. To validate the underlying structure of the scale, a second sample of 350 university undergraduates will be recruited to complete the final version of the scale. To help establish the construct validity of the scale, these participants will also complete other published scales such as the Pharmacological Optimism Scale (Kenna & Wood, 2008) that measure similar constructs. To examine the generalizability of the scale structure, a non-student sample of 350 participants will be recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online labour recruitment tool.