Perception of the Effects of Substance Abuse among University Students: A Case of Built Environment and Civil Engineering Students at a South African University in Gauteng Province

Abstract

Substance abuse among youths is a worldwide epidemic that impacts negatively on the health sector as well as the family and society. Early student life at the university is a time of tremendous high motivation to conform to the behaviours, values and attitudes that are valued by the student culture. However, students observe their peers’ behaviour and alter their own behaviour with their peers’ norms and expectations. Some of the perceived peer norms can however lead to substance abuse, which has led students’ not to complete their education. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to determine students’ perception on the effects of substance abuse on their physical, cognitive and affective development. The research philosophy adopted was positivism and the approach was deductive. Hence, a self-administered questionnaire containing items developed from literature review was administered to 199 built environment and civil engineering students at a South African university. The data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21. The reliability for internal consistency of the measured constructs i.e. physical, cognitive and affective was determined using Cronbach’s alpha test. Independent sample t-test was used to test the hypotheses on the perception of students who had experimented on drugs and those who had not experimented on drugs on their physical, cognitive and affective development. The results suggest that over 40 percent of students in this university are not aware of the substance abuse policy. Furthermore there was no statistical significant difference on the perception of the effect of substance abuse on students who had experimented on drugs and those who had not experimented on drugs on their physical and affective development. However, there was a significant difference on the effect on their cognitive development. It is recommended that students at this university should be made aware of the substance abuse policy. Furthermore, those who experimented on substances e.g. drugs indicated less perception on their effects on their cognitive development. It is recommended that this cohort of students warrants further research.