The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a questionnaire that assesses the expectancies of experienced and naive subjects concerning the effects of different abused substances. A second purpose was to determine whether expectancies for different substances were different from each other, and whether expectancies were different between experienced and naive subjects. 240 subjects have been given the ARCDEQ. This instrument involves 36 adjectives used to described expected effects of cocaine, heroin, alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine. The same adjectives are used for each drug. Preliminary results with 120 subjects indicated that 1) expectancies had high internal consistency, 2) were different for different drugs, 3) differed between experienced and naive subjects, and 3) had good test-retest reliability in 20 subjects who took the ARCDEQ twice on different occasions. The purpose for the additional 120 subjects is to determine split-half reliability and validity.
