Accordingly, it was asserted at the start of this dissertation that, because of the ongoing changes in the public’s knowledge about and attitudes toward marijuana use, the informational assumptions that individuals maintain at the time judgment are important for understanding their reasoning and ultimate evaluations of the issue. To gain insight into their informational assumptions about marijuana use, respondents were asked to evaluate the act if it was determined to be safe or determined to be harmful. Results provided support for the proposition that the types informational assumptions maintained and the way these assumptions are understood are integral to individuals’ ultimate judgments. The introduction of the ‘lack-of-harm condition’ to respondents who had initially stated a belief in harmfulness resulted in a significant positive shift. The reverse was also true : Respondents who had stated a belief in the safety of marijuana use were somewhat less likely to provide positive evaluations of use after being introduced to the proposition that use was harmful. These findings suggest that informational assumptions about the harm had considerable effects on respondents’ judgments about marijuana use. Importantly, not all the respondents who were asked to consider marijuana use under the proposition that use was harmful were swayed toward negative evaluations of marijuana use. Nearly half of these respondents provided positive or mixed/uncertain evaluations of marijuana use even under the condition of definite harm. This may have resulted for various reasons, such as respondents’ weighing of the harm factor against other relevant considerations. For example,vertical growing system justification results suggest that respondents’ support for the medical use of marijuana and/or for an individual’s right to choose was a prominent consideration in their reasoning .
Such considerations may have ultimately outweighed concerns about the harm involved in use. Thus, findings indicating shifts in marijuana act evaluations under the condition of harm or lack thereof, as well as findings suggesting that the certainty of harm wasn’t necessarily sufficient for all respondents to evaluate the act negatively demonstrate the important role informational assumptions play in judgments of ambiguous social issues. Moreover, these findings imply that the uncertainties about the facts regarding the safety of marijuana use, as well as general shifts in the public’s perceptions of and attitudes toward the issue , may play a significant role in how adolescents evaluate this issue.Because the data for this study were gathered through a convenience sampling of students from multiple periods of the same course in a northern Bay Area school, the generalizability of these findings to the larger adolescent population is limited. It is possible that factors such as respondents’ city of residence, particularly their location in the Bay Area of California , may have been critically influential to respondents’ response patterns . A similar study conducted with adolescents of the same age in a more politically conservative area of the United States may have yielded a different pattern of findings. Moreover, because respondents were all enrolled in the same course, factors like the academic material previously covered in the course or the group’s shared perspectives or experiences may have also contributed to their response patterns. Future studies that include samples of students from various schools or courses in multiple regions of the country would be valuable for improving the generalizability of this study and serving as comparisons for the current findings. Relatedly, it is important to consider the impact of cohort effects on this study’s results. Changes in public perceptions of marijuana, the media’s presentation of the safety, commonality, and general acceptability of marijuana, as well as many other considerations have been impactful to adolescents’ judgments about this issue.
The present study attempted to account for such unknowns by avoiding forced-choice methodologies and instead using a short-answer approach to data collection. However, taking this approach was not necessarily a sufficient means for accounting for the depth and breadth of factors that may have influenced this sample’s judgments, including factors that respondents may not have been conscious of or able to articulate. Future research may benefit from using an interview approach for data collection to gain a degree of clarity about the roles of these variables in adolescents’ judgments. Also because of the ongoing changes in societal perceptions and attitudes toward marijuana use, it may be that these respondents’ judgments about the marijuana use issue would be unstable over time. It is possible that as the research, public perception, and legal status of marijuana change over time, so will judgments about the issue. As an example, the data for this study were gathered before a pivotal election determining the legality of recreational use of marijuana for individuals 21 years of age or older in the state where the data for this study were gathered . Although a significant number of the respondents in this study already indicated positive views toward marijuana use under the condition of a legal age , this kind of significant actual change in legal status has an unknowable impact on judgments; it is likely that such a change would have an impact on respondents’ judgments about marijuana use. These types of societal shifts, as well as other contextual caveats, make conclusive determinations about judgments of marijuana use challenging. Accordingly, the present study can be considered a snapshot of a specific population’s judgments about this issue at a specific time. Ongoing research investigating changes in judgments about marijuana use over time could help elucidate any changes in the controversial nature of various other ambiguous social issues like marijuana use .
The stealing and purchasing music issues were selected as prototypically moral and personal issues to serve as points of comparison to the marijuana issue . The expected pattern of results emerged from the data, showing that stealing was consistently evaluated negatively and justified with moral domain justifications, music purchasing was consistently evaluated positively and primarily justified with personal domain responses, and evaluations of marijuana use were more mixed and showed justification variability. It can be argued that the consequences related to a prototypically moral issue like stealing are more consequential than any potential morally-related consequences of marijuana use. For example, the stealing issue calls to mind concerns about the welfare of others and moral obligations in general. Though these considerations seem at first to stand in contrast to considerations regarding marijuana use, a review of respondents’ justifications provides evidence suggesting that the marijuana use issue also has features of such prototypically moral issues. Results from the present study indicated that, though they were not prompted to consider the medical use of marijuana, respondents frequently referred to this consideration. Respondents who provided Medical Purposes justifications often stated that marijuana could be beneficial for the well being of individuals who benefit from its use for medical reasons and that it therefore would be unfair or unjust to disallow its use. In fact,marijuana drying as previously explained, justifications referring to medical uses would be classified under the Welfare justification category of the moral domain . Thus, this consideration suggests that not only is marijuana use relevant to the moral domain, but is perceived to have critical ramifications on the lives of others in similar ways to other more typically moral issues such as stealing. In addition to considerations of the medical benefits of marijuana use, respondents also made frequent references to personal choice justifications when explaining their reasoning. Though these responses were coded as personal domain justifications, respondents’ arguments when stating this justification frequently referred to the importance of the individual’s right to choose what he/she does with his/her mind and body. Arguably, this line of reasoning may have been represented in the Justice/Rights category of the moral domain as many respondents asserted that taking away one’s right to choose to use marijuana was akin to taking away any other personal freedoms. These examples are provided to demonstrate that, in some ways, individuals have come to view marijuana in terms of morally-relevant consideration like welfare, justice, and rights. Accordingly, comparing a multi-faceted issue like marijuana use to a prototypical one like stealing helped provide insight into the salience and importance of different informational assumptions adolescents draw upon and coordinate in the process of forming judgments about social issues. Interestingly, whereas some respondents primarily referred to the importance of having the right to choose whether to use marijuana , others found this justification less weighty in their evaluative process. For example, results suggested that respondents were in fact more likely to reference prudential as well as conventional considerations when justifying their responses to the marijuana use items. This stood in contrast to their primarily personal domain justifications for the music item set. Their justifications to the music items, as well as their consistently positive evaluations of the act of purchasing music , provided a point of contrast to their more variable evaluations and justifications of marijuana use.
Comparisons of the prototypically moral and personal issues selected for this study thus provided greater clarity about the differences between adolescents’ conceptualizations of this multi-faceted/ambiguous social issue and their understanding of other more unequivocal social issues. Accordingly, future research in this field may likewise benefit from the inclusion of such prototypical issues to allow for comparisons and deeper insights into the topic issue.Additional noteworthy considerations for future research emerged from this study’s results. Because of the relative prevalence of this consideration among the respondents in this sample, as well as its the moral relevance , study-design that distinguishes the medical use of marijuana from use for recreational reasons may prove to be worthwhile in future research on this issue. The absence a of distinction between these two different uses of marijuana seemed to cause uncertainty regarding the basis for some of the positive evaluations of marijuana in the present study. For example, it was unclear when and to what extent respondents’ positive evaluations of marijuana use were based on considerations of medical use, recreational use, or both. Making this distinction would therefore provide more constructive information about judgments and further elucidate their reasoning about the issue. Additional questions teasing apart adolescents’ judgments about the harm involved in marijuana use and about the age at which they are more or less likely to consider use acceptable would likewise provide valuable data on their perspectives on the issue. The present study asked respondents whether they thought that frequent marijuana use causes physical or psychological harm to the user . Future research may consider the inclusion of additional questions about whether respondents think any use causes harm and/or questions about how much use is thought to be associated with what degree of harm. Moreover, additional open-ended questions about the age at which respondents think marijuana use is acceptable would add valuable information regarding their reasoning about marijuana use . Respondents at times reported that setting the legal age for marijuana at 21 would be appropriate because development is generally complete by this age, because adults of this age are mature and responsible enough to make their own choices about use, and because the effects of marijuana use are comparable to that of alcohol use so these substances should be treated similarly. Such considerations entice further questions about how adolescents would evaluate and reason about marijuana use at different ages . Thus, questions asking respondents to distinguish between the specific purpose of use, frequency of use, and the user’s age would provide further clarity into results and allow for greater insights into adolescents’ reasoning about this issue. As the field of education and psychology has grown and research on child development has advanced, so has our understanding of adolescent cognition. In many ways, adolescents are still children who are developing their understanding of their social worlds by assimilating new information with old and by reconciling the inconsistencies that arise. With new experiences and with new knowledge, thinking becomes more complex and judgments more nuanced . Transitions in adolescents’ social world, including advances in research, shifts in public policy and perception, and various other contextual changes in which adolescents function have important effects on how they conceptualize and reason about social issues. In the present study, adolescents’ judgments and justifications about one social issue in particular, marijuana use, was investigated using the social domain theory framework. Results supported the hypothesized ambiguity of this issue and demonstrated the complexity in adolescent reasoning about the act.