Marijuana knowledge, confidence in knowledge, and information efficacy as the protective and risk factors of marijuana use among college students

Gender differences in the risk and protective factors of marijuana use among U.S. College students

“…Counselors and intervention specialists could make students question their marijuana knowledge and the information sources by addressing misperceptions about marijuana health effects commonly held by students and revealing the financial interests behind many of the sources. Risk behavior intervention programs could also cite previous research findings such as the lack of relationship between actual knowledge and confidence in knowledge (Park et al, 2020a; Radecki and Jaccard, 1995).…”

“…In contrast, their marijuana-using peers showed higher knowledge of the new marijuana laws (Bull et al, 2017). Similarly, a survey of college students demonstrated an inverse relationship between knowledge and marijuana use that was mediated by perceived risk (Park et al, 2020a). Even among pro-marijuana conference attendees, people with more accurate health effects knowledge used marijuana less frequently than their less knowledgeable fellow marijuana enthusiasts (Kruger et al, 2020).…”

“…Young men who were confident in their marijuana knowledge were more likely to use marijuana (Parker and Fischhoff, 2005). Confidence in knowledge was also related to marijuana use among a sample of college women and men (Park et al, 2020a).…”

“…Existing evidence indicated that college students’ marijuana use is related to perceived risk (Schuermeyer et al, 2014; Wen et al, 2019) and peer disapproval (Holmes et al, 2016; LaBrie et al, 2011). In addition, preliminary evidence suggested that marijuana use is likely related to knowledge (Kruger et al, 2020) and confidence in knowledge (Park et al, 2020a). Because these variables might be also related to one another, a research question was posed to investigate the roles the risk/protective factors play in the gender difference in marijuana use.…”

Marijuana Message Channels, Health Knowledge, Law Knowledge, and Confidence in Knowledge as Risk and Protective Factors of Marijuana Use among College Students

“…To date, a few studies reported that more accurate knowledge of new marijuana laws (MK-L) was related to more use (Brooks-Russell et al, 2017;Bull et al, 2017;Park, Yun, et al, 2022;Roppolo et al, 2019), whereas accurate knowledge of marijuana health effects (MK-H) was related to less use (Kruger et al, 2020;Park et al, 2022b). Also observed was more marijuana use among college students with higher confidence in marijuana knowledge (CMK), a meta-cognition about knowledge (Park et al, 2022a). This is an important construct because prior work has established that confidence in knowledge is often misaligned with one's objectively measured knowledge (Kruger & Dunning, 1999).…”