OF PREVENTION OF ADDICTIONS
Alena Váchová Charles University, Faculty of Education, Magdalény Rettigové 4, Prague, Czechia alena.vachova@pedf.cuni.cz Jaroslava Hanušová Charles University, Faculty of Education, Magdalény Rettigové 4, Prague, Czechia jaroslava.hanusova@pedf.cuni.cz pedagogy and andragogy. Kraków: Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny w Krakowie. DOI 10.24917/9788394156893.16
Introduction
Healthy development of young people is conditioned by a good family background and other social relationships outside the family (with adults and peers). For proper mental development of an individual, a positive relationship to oneself is essential as well. It is widely known that the youngsters have a greater tendency to take risks, because they are more prone to test their limits and fear less of the consequences (Čerešník, 2015).
Young people are threatened by numerous health risks typical for this life stage. It has been shown that the manifestations of risk behaviour often occur simultaneously. They frequently tend to have the same causes as well as identical risk and protective factors (Sobotková, 2014).
The term risk behavior represents such behavior which can lead to a verifiable increase in the health, social, educational and other risks for an individual or the society. In the cur-rent school prevention, the following areas of risk behavior are distinguished: truancy, bullying and extreme forms of aggression, adventure sports and risk behaviour in traf-fic, racism, xenophobia, negative impact of sects, sexual risk behavior, a range of eating disorders and dependency behaviour, substance abuse, netolism and gambling (Miovský et al., 2010).
One of the major problems for young people in the Czech Republic, but also in a global scale, is the overuse of addictive substances. These mainly include alcohol, cigarettes (including electronic ones) and cannabis (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction [EMCDDA], 2017). Addictive substance use can be considered a risk behaviour involving a lot of factors. It is well known that substance use at a youthful age is associated with an increased risk of disorders of drug use at a later age, mental health problems, which may result in a considerable burden of diseases, followed by significant social and economic costs (DeWit, Adlaf, Offord & Ogborne, 2000; Gil, Wagner & Tub-man, 2004; Rehm et al., 2009). The Czech Republic has repeatedly participated in the international survey of the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD). In the European context, the experience of Czech 16-year-olds is above aver-age, especially concerning the life experience with the use of legal and illegal drugs. They have ranked at the top in the occurrence of cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking in the past 30 days and in experience with legal substances under the age of 13. As for il-legal drugs, the Czech 16-year-olds have the highest incidence of cannabis use in life and in the past 12 months. Experience with the use of drugs other than cannabis in Czech students is comparable to the average of other European countries. The occasional ciga-rette smoking and a reasonable alcohol drinking, as well as experimental and occasional use of cannabis are not considered very risky by the Czech 16-year-olds (Chomynová, Csémy, & Mravčík, 2016).
To improve this situation, only systematic preventive action on youngsters, both by their families, as well as schools can help. Due to heavy workload, parents often spend only
a few hours a day with their children, therefore the impact of the school environment may be decisive for a variety of matters, including the effect on risk behaviour (Hajný, 2001). School and teachers take over a vital role in preventive action.
Schools should shape an individual to become an independently acting person. It focuses on performance and enables to gain knowledge, as well as intentionally and unintentionally affects the integration of individuals into the social and interper-sonal relations, but also connects vocational training with preparation for family life. Therefore, schools are places where educational activities take place, but at the same time, they play an equally crucial role in upbringing. The school environment represents an environment to explore not only the material world, but it is also an area in which a person becomes involved with the world of relationships where the socialization of the individual, interpersonal communication and personal growth are performed. Teachers have therefore a unique opportunity to take advantage of this opportunity in the life of their students towards the promotion of the process of establishing and strengthening of moral values, increasing social competencies and personality development. The role of the teacher is very difficult, because in addition to the knowledge and skills required for education in a particular field, it also includes additional requirements in social skills. Prevention, not only of ad-dictions, is a very important part of the professional life of a teacher. It is necessary that each educational worker had at least fundamental knowledge in risk behaviour (Gillerová, 2003).
Teaching staff must be adequately prepared to understand their students to be able to detect any problems in time and were capable of giving advice to the parents, who can help their children to solve the arising issues effectively. In the Czech Republic, a unified system of education of teaching workers in the area of prevention has not been introduced yet. Based on the VYNSPI project, a complete system of teacher and consulting worker training in primary prevention of risk behaviour has been de-veloped in the Czech Republic, which includes a four-level model of education and standards for educators in this area, but it still has not been fully put into practice (Charvát, 2012).
The faculties of education do not systematically teach prevention. Department of Edu-cation of Faculty of EduEdu-cation at Charles University, however, provides its students an option to be educated in the field of risk behaviour prevention in several courses (e.g.
crime or bullying prevention). The courses include a Seminar on the prevention of ad-dictions. Increasing knowledge and skills of future educators in prevention of risk be-haviour also motivates the teachers at the Faculty of Education at Charles University to continually improve the quality of the curriculum and its adaptation to the knowledge and skills of the students. For these reasons, a survey was conducted to identify input knowledge of third-year Pedagogy students in the field of addictology and prevention of addictions.
Methodology
Input knowledge validation of the students in the area of risk behaviour prevention and addictology basics included 180 third-year students of Bachelor studies (130 students in full-time study, 50 students in combined forms of study) who had been studying in the Department of Education of the Faculty of Education at Charles University. The data presented in this text represents only partial results of a long-term study which aims to improve the curriculum in selected training subjects. The main objective of the survey presented herein was to determine what input knowledge the students coming to study the course Seminar on the prevention of addictions have. The data presented here was obtained in the years 2015–2017.
A questionnaire consisting of 15 questions was used for detecting the information.
14 questions were closed, and one question was open. In the questions checking par-ticular knowledge, only one option was correct. The questionnaire was distributed in a paper form at the first session of the course Seminar on the prevention of addictions.
All students submitted their completed questionnaires to a predetermined place after a maximum of 30 minutes. The students were asked not to sign or otherwise mark the questionnaire and to carefully answer all the questions. At the beginning of the question-naire, there were questions focused on the gender, age, form of study and length of the student’s educational practice. They were followed by questions on knowledge of notions in the field of healthy lifestyle (the notion of health) and legislation (a dependent child) and questions on knowledge in risk behaviour prevention and basic terms in addictolo-gy. The final open question examined how the students would proceed in the event when an obviously intoxicated student was present in their class they were going to teach.
The data from the questionnaires was converted into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and processed. After that, frequency and percentage of each answer were obtained. All dis-tributed questionnaires were used in the survey.