Based on their response to the question about common practice, respondents were directed to answer whether marijuana use would be all right in places where it was not common practice or generally accepted or whether it would be all right in places where it was common practice and generally accepted . Respondents were also asked whether they think that the frequent use of marijuana causes physical or psychological harm to the user and to indicate why or why not. Based on their response to this item about the harmfulness of marijuana, respondents were directed to respond to a follow-up question asking them whether it would be all right to use marijuana if scientists were able to definitively conclude that marijuana use is safe or harmless to the user , or whether it would be all right to use marijuana if scientists were able to definitively conclude that marijuana use is not safe or harmless to the user . Each item response was assigned one or more justification code according to the types of references the respondent made as he/she justified his/her evaluation. Because of the openended, short-answer format of the survey, responses to items may have referenced one or more of the categories. That is, a respondent may have mentioned considerations pertaining to any of the above justification categories, and so, a single response could have been assigned one or more of the justification codes. For example, a single item response could have referred to considerations about rules or laws regarding the act and the safety of engaging in the act, while also noting considerations of one’s right to choose to engage in the act –such a response would thereby yield three justification codes. Also due to the open-ended nature of the survey, respondents at times provided ‘uncodeable’ responses. Uncodable responses were typically either insubstantial to determine what the respondent meant ,drying curing or did not clearly answer the question being asked . Informational Assumptions. Respondents’ informational assumptions about the harm involved in marijuana use assessed by item 5 and the two sub-questions of this item.

Item 5 asked respondents whether they think frequent use of marijuana causes physical or psychological harm to the user, and why or why not they think it does or doesn’t. Responses were assigned a Yes, No, or Uncertain/Mixed code to the first part of this question. The second part of this question was not coded, as this information was not relevant to the aims of this study. However, respondents’ verbatim responses to this item were transcribed and are presented in Appendix D. Based on their response to whether or not they think marijuana use causes harm, respondents were directed to then answer either Item 5a or Item 5b. Those who reported thinking marijuana use does cause harm were asked to suppose that scientists were able to conclude without a doubt that marijuana use is safe or harmless to the user and to judge whether use would be all right or not all right in this hypothetical case. The opposite scenario was presented to those who reported thinking that marijuana use does not cause harm to the user. Planned pairwise contrasts using chi-squared tests were used to analyze whether statistically significant differences exist between participants’ responses to different questions. Correlations between variables were calculated using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient . For these tests, the null hypothesis was that there is no difference in the way the sample of participants responded to the questions. The alternative hypothesis was that there is enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis. In all tests, an alpha value of .05 is considered significant for rejection. Respondents’ evaluations were also tested to determine whether a statistical difference existed in how they responded within each item. Multi-nomial goodness-of-fit was tested for each item. The test evaluated the probability of the observed count in each response category being equal to the expected count in each category. A p-value < .05 was taken as evidence that the observed cell counts were statistically improbable enough to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference between expected and observed counts. Due to the small sample nature of the experiment, Monte Carlo exact tests were used to compute goodness-of fit. A log linear regression was used to analyze domain use within each of the three issues for the justification results. The Poisson function in Stata15 was used to model counts of how often participants referenced each category within a particular issue. Coefficients were reported as odds relative to the reference category, which was always the most frequently referenced domain, and p-values are derived from Wald tests.

The distribution of responses was compared between races. Pairwise contrasts for item and self-report race were conducted using chi-squared tests. The contingency tables were very sparse, suggesting that the results of this analysis should be interpreted with caution. Furthermore, the pairwise contrasts produced results that were not statistically significant aside for one item. For the one item that showed a statistically significant difference between race , 15 out of 25 cells were sparse , with many expected values being below 1 and some at 0. Due to the lack of compelling evidence for statistically significant differences in responses between race/ethnicities and the presence of very sparse tables created by the analysis, the race variable was removed from the analysis. The first research question asked how adolescents evaluate the use of marijuana. Respondents were asked for their evaluations on marijuana use in order to assess overall attitudes toward the issue and to compare judgments on this issue with judgments on stealing and purchasing music. Respondents’ judgments about marijuana use was further assessed through questions asking for respondents’ evaluations of the legality of the act and the acceptability of the act if it is commonly practiced or legal for individuals ages 21 and older. Table 3 shows respondents’ answers to the initial set of marijuana questions. Generally, results suggest that the majority respondents indicated that marijuana use is all right across the conditions presented and should be not be prohibited by law. However,dry cannabis they also reported that frequent use causes harm to the user. Results of multinomial goodness-of-fit tests are presented to demonstrate the statistical significance of respondents’ evaluation patterns by item. Pairwise contrasts between respondents’ general act evaluations of marijuana and their evaluations to each of the other marijuana items were also conducted as points of comparison . Note that, throughout this chapter, percentages that do not add up to 100 indicate the presence of ‘uncodeable’ or incomplete data. Respondents’ evaluations of marijuana use were expected to show variance and thereby support the hypothesis that marijuana is an ambiguous issue. This hypothesis was expected to be further supported by comparisons with the stealing and purchasing music items that were expected to show little to no response variance. The contrast between the marijuana use response pattern and the prototypically moral and personal domain issues was thus expected to further demonstrate the ambiguous nature of the marijuana use issue. The first item on the survey was used to investigate respondents’ general evaluations about marijuana use. Results indicated that respondents’ evaluations of marijuana use varied significantly = 36.14, p < .0001, with more respondents reporting positive or uncertain evaluations of marijuana use than negative evaluations of use. Item 2 asked respondents whether they think marijuana use should be prohibited by law. A comparison of responses with this item to similar items asking respondents to judge the legality stealing and purchasing music were intended to see if the marijuana use issue differs from these prototypical issues.

Results indicate that significantly fewer respondents reported favoring a law prohibiting the use of marijuana = 14.73, p = .0002. Most respondents thought that there should not be a law prohibiting marijuana use. Only 30% of respondents agreed that there should be a law prohibiting marijuana use . A pairwise contrast with item 1 shows that there was a statistically significant difference between how respondents initially evaluated marijuana and how they responded to the question about marijuana legality = 20.89, p < .001). The effect size is medium . Thus, responses to the question about marijuana use in general were different than responses to evaluations about the legality of marijuana. Respondents’ answers to these questions were moderately negatively correlated . This suggests providing a positive evaluation of marijuana use is associated with a negative evaluation of a law prohibiting use . Most respondents reported positive evaluations to the question asking whether marijuana use would be all right under the condition that it was commonly practiced or accepted. Results indicated that respondents reported significantly higher positive evaluations to marijuana use when asked about the acceptability of use under the condition that it is commonly practiced = 38.12 p < .0001). Most respondents stated that marijuana use would be all right in this case. However, 25% of respondents maintained that marijuana use would not be all right even if it was a common practice and 12% provided mixed or uncertain responses . A pairwise contrast between the common practice question and item 1 was statistically significant = 25.4, p < .001and had a medium effect size . Follow up analyses indicated that shifts from respondents’ general marijuana use evaluations to their evaluations under the common practice condition were primarily due to respondents changing their uncertain evaluations to negative evaluations. Thus, those who had initially provided uncertain evaluations about the acceptability of marijuana use were not persuaded to think use was all right under the common practice condition. Rather, they were more likely to shift to a negative evaluation when judging the act solely on the contingency of common practice. This suggests that other considerations were more prominent in these respondents’ reasoning process; that is, the common practice of the act was not an adequate contingency to shift these respondents’ judgments to a positive evaluation. Little shift occurred from positive responses to item 1 to positive responses to the common practice item. The second research question asked whether adolescents evaluated the use of marijuana by adults differently than use in general. In order to determine whether respondents’ judgments about the act were contingent on the age of the user, they were asked whether use by adults of a certain age would be acceptable if it was permitted by law. Respondents provided significantly higher positive evaluations of marijuana use under this contingency = 104.4, p < .0001. In fact, responses to this item had the highest rate of positive evaluations of marijuana use . A pairwise contrast of this item with the general marijuana use evaluation item was statistically significant = 35.7, p < .001 and had a medium effect size . This suggests that adolescents judge marijuana use under the legal age contingency more favorably than use in general . Results thus indicate that respondents judge marijuana use by adults differently than they how they judge marijuana use generally; they are more likely to find that marijuana use is acceptable for adults 21 years of age or older in the presence of a law permitting such use. Respondents’ evaluations of marijuana use for adults conditional on their general evaluations of marijuana use were further compared using a cross tabulation of responses to these two items. Results are presented in Table 4, showing that 91% of those who initially agreed that marijuana use was acceptable also reported thinking that use would be all right under the age contingency condition. Of the few respondents who initially disagreed that marijuana use is acceptable , most shifted to agree that marijuana use would be all right under the age contingency condition. Respondents who initially had uncertain general evaluations about marijuana use also tended to shift their judgments under the age contingency condition. Of these respondents, 77% went on to say use would be all right for adults 21 and older. Comparison of marijuana use evaluations to prototypically moral and personal act evaluations. The fifth research question asked how adolescents’ evaluations of marijuana use compares to those of a prototypical moral issue and a prototypical personal issue . Comparisons between results from the marijuana use issue and results from the prototypical issues were intended to ascertain if marijuana use is an ambiguous issue that is judged with greater variability than issues that fall more clearly within moral or personal domains.