Anticipatory Socialization toward College as a Factor in Adolescent Marijuana Use

Abstract

This paper seeks to help explain why such a flagrant and heavily penalized form of deviance as marijuana use should occur among otherwise conforming middle-class youth. Finding most theories of deviance inappropriate to this particular phenomenon, the study employs the anticipatory socialization theory and tests the hypothesis that college-oriented high school students, perceiving marijuana use as part of a collegiate style of life, will be more likely to have used marijuana than will high school students not expecting to go to college. A “Scale of Anticipatory Socialization Toward College” was found to be strongly predictive of marijuana use for boys of upper socioeconomic status and for students claiming no formal religious affiliation; it was mildly predictive for the religiously affiliated and for those from middle socioeconomic status; but it had no predictive power for girls or for students from blue-collar socioeconomic status.