Resources, Behavior Intentions, and Drug Use: A Ten-Year National Panel Analysis

The purpose of this study is to use theoretically derived revisions of the FishbeinlAjzen formulation of behavior intentions as heuristic models for understanding the role of resources in the relationship between intentions and behavior. The argument is made that resources or opportunities to engage in a behavior can influence behavior in two ways: they can have a direct effect on behavior or can affect the relationship between intention and behavior for behaviors in which the variation in resources is high relative to the variation in intentions. With data from a longitudinal national probability sample of men (N= 1941), models incorporating resources are applied to marijuana use and to cocaine use. The findings indicate that prior intentions predict changes in the use of both these drugs over a 10-year interval, and that resources have more of an effect (additive and interactive) in models predicting cocaine use. These findings provide evidence to substantiate previously advanced theoretical propositions, and indicate that resources are important contingency conditions in applying models of behavior intentions to complex social behaviors.