Cultural Factors in Substance Abuse

Abstract

From the angle of behavior, cultural factors create psychological dispositions rooted in people’s histories and shared experiences that shape their world and actions, mostly without their awareness. These dispositions are of natural interest to professionals whose success in providing effective help and services depends on their ability to take the dispositions of their clients into consideration. This is a particularly demanding requirement in servicing minority populations with backgrounds different from the American mainstream. The main instruments used in the field of substance abuse and prevention are acculturation questionnaires. Our measure of cultural distance is a comparable tool based on imaging and mapping.