Overall, it was found that the GAD-7 is a valid and reliable tool for screening GAD as well as assessing its severity. This will be easily applied to our own research. Not only does it give background on the development of a nationally-accepted anxiety self-report scale, it also provides a brief scale that we can utilize in our survey. This ultimately helped us to operationally define anxiety within the context of our study.
Previous research has established that males and females abuse drugs differently, that drug use is not related to drug policy, that the Cannabis Use Disorder Identification Test is a valid measure of discerning a cannabis use disorder, that psychiatric disorders are common in college students, and that the Generalized…show more content… In our study, gender was measured through self-reported data. Anxiety was measured through the GAD-7 scale which calculated responses to seven questions. A score of 5 indicated the cut-off point for mild anxiety, a score of 10 indicated the cut-off for moderate anxiety, and a score of 15 indicated the cut-off for severe anxiety. Finally, we operationally defined the presence of a potential issue with cannabis via the CUDIT scale. A score of 8 or more indicated hazardous use and a score of 12 or more constituted a cannabis-use disorder. With these operational definitions in mind, we identified three primary hypotheses, which…show more content… The Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test, or the CUDIT, was used to measure cannabis use (Adamson and Sellman, 2003). The CUDIT consisted of ten questions. This portion of the survey included instructions that the participants were to base their answers off of their cannabis use in the past six months. Questions included items such as “How many hours were you "stoned" on a typical day when you had been using marijuana?” and “How often did you find that you were not able to stop using marijuana once you had started?”. The options for all of the questions on the CUDIT included a Likert scale, and for the two aforementioned questions, the scale included the responses ‘never’, ‘less than monthly’, ‘monthly’, ‘weekly’, and ‘daily or almost daily’. Scores were calculated through predetermined numerical values associated with each answer. Those scores were computed and a score of 8 or more indicated hazardous cannabis use and a score of 12 or more constituted a cannabis-use disorder, which is also how participants were assigned into categorical levels. No items were reverse
