Relationship between Demographic Factors and the Misuse of Recreational Drugs among the Students of the Faculty of Science of the University of Kelaniya

Abstract

Drug abuse has been identified as a global health issue. It can be identified as one of the root causes of destroying peoples’ lives and souls. This has a huge impact on their academic performance as well as the productivity of their lives. This study has explored the factors affecting the misuse of recreational drugs among university students. The main objective of the study was to identify the relationship between demographic factors and the misuse of recreational drugs among the students of the Faculty of Science of the University of Kelaniya. Data were collected through an online questionnaire survey. Snowball sampling was used as the sampling technique. A descriptive analysis was performed and a binary logistic regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) were used to evaluate the best statistical model to predict drug usage. Participants included 220 students from the Faculty of Science of the University of Kelaniya. The descriptive analysis showed that male drug usage was higher than female drug usage. Also, the drug consumption of the third-year students was higher than the other students. Students whose parents were illiterate showed a higher value of drug consumption than the other students. Also, the drug usage among the students who lived in the hostel was significantly higher than the others. It was also revealed that the most commonly used drug is alcohol. Among the fitted models, SVM Non-Random spilt model showed the highest accuracy (93.1818%) in predicting drug usage. Based on the results, gender, religion, year of study, involvement of a part-time job, participation in the sports activities, financial support from bursary or mahapola, mother’s education level, father’s occupation, ethnicity, marital status of the parents were identified as the associated factors of the drug usage among the students.