Doping Use in High-School Students: Measuring Attitudes, Self-Efficacy, and Moral Disengagement Across Genders and Countries

Laura Girelli; Elisa Cavicchiolo; Fabio Alivernini; Sara Manganelli; Andrea Chirico; Federica Galli; Mauro Cozzolino; Fabio Lucidi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00663

Doping Use in High-School Students: Measuring Attitudes, Self-Efficacy, and Moral Disengagement Across Genders and Countries

Front Psychol. 2020 Apr 28:11:663. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00663. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Laura Girelli¹, Elisa Cavicchiolo², Fabio Alivernini², Sara Manganelli², Andrea Chirico³, Federica Galli³, Mauro Cozzolino¹, Fabio Lucidi³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Human, Philosophical, and Educational Sciences, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy.
² National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI), Rome, Italy.
³ Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.

Abstract

The main aim of this research was to test the factorial validity and measurement invariance across genders and countries of a set of instruments designed to assess high-school students' attitudes, self-regulatory efficacy, and moral disengagement with regard to doping. A second aim was to examine the criterion and predictive validity of these scales. In total, 402 high-school students from Italy, Romania, and Turkey (40.0, 25.1, and 34.9%, respectively; M age 14.78 years old; SD = 1.04; 52.8% females) completed questionnaires measuring attitudes toward doping, self-regulatory efficacy in refraining from doping, doping-specific moral disengagement, and intention to use doping substances. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported our expectations with regard to the factor structure of the scales. Multigroup CFAs provided evidence for the full equivalence of the measures across males and females and partial equivalence of the measures across the three countries. The results of the latent mean comparison showed that male students had lower levels of self-regulatory efficacy than females and that Romanian and Turkish students had higher levels of moral disengagement and lower level of self-regulatory efficacy than Italian students. Finally, the results of a structural equation modeling supported the hypothesis that the proposed model predicted students' intentions to use doping, thus generally confirming the criterion and the predictive validity of the measures. These findings suggested the validity of a set of instruments measuring attitudes toward doping, self-regulatory efficacy to refrain from doping, and doping-specific moral disengagement in high-school students from a cross-gender and a cross-cultural perspective and provided meaningful estimates of the differences in the three factors between males and females as well as between Italian, Romanian, and Turkish high-school students.

Keywords: cross-cultural differences; gender differences; high-school students; measurement invariance; moral disengagement; self-regulatory efficacy.