The Difference in Cultural Attitudes Towards Addiction and its Factors

Raja Khan ’25

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Rudski

What is the broader impact of your summer research? That is, why should the world care about your work?

The big “why” for my summer research is the influence of cultural difference on addiction and how it impacts people suffering from addiction emphasizing on stigma. I believe this is important because of the impact stigma and associated stigma can have on someone’s mental health and how it may lead to worsened addiction. Culture plays a huge role in perceptions and as such affects stigma. For my little “why”, I created a questionnaire to assess cultural values, used pre existing surveys to view attitudes towards harm reduction, addiction, etc. My own project compared and contrasted the differences between India and America specifically which helped me grasp what a broader lens would look like.  

What has summer research taught you about yourself and the field that you researched and/or studied?

This summer has been one full of self reflection and has taught me that I can be very driven when I set goals for myself which allow me to push myself further than before. This suffering allowed me to be self-sufficient and meet my own needs in every regard whether that be emotionally, cooking food for myself and my roommates and has shown me a new side of myself. The complicated nature of addiction is very well known but there is an extensive discourse on the models of addiction and how one should analyze them. I learned how to analyze and compile data along with using SPSS to compile data in a better manner. 

What advice would you give to students considering a future research opportunity similar to the one you participated in?

Believe in yourself and use all the resources available at your disposal. Everyone around is here to help you, make sure you ask for help whether it be from peers, administrators or professors.