The concept of context in the field of addiction research. A review

Objective: In the field of addiction research, the studies have typically focused on the identification of individual factors that affect the onset and maintenance of addictive behaviors. However, during the last 20 years, there has been a growing interest in the role of social and cultural factors and efforts have also been made to re-situate addicts in their social environment. The authors reviewed the literature on addictions with the purpose of investigating how scholars have conceptualized and incorporated contextual influences in their work. Method: Studies investigating different aspects of the “context”, published in the period 2012-2014 in one of the most representative journal in the field, were analyzed. Results: From a total of 126 studies examined, 14 macro-categories and 56 sub-categories were identified. Most of the articles identify the context with the socio-demographic variables, the exposition to addictive behaviors in the social environment and different social and familiar factors (like media influence, parental style, etc); Conclusions: Currently, there is a huge variability in the way of defining and analyzing the role of context. Only few studies addressed the role of culture. The view of culture as the context-container to which individuals belong emerges, with a little recognition of the role of individuals in negotiating their cultural world and the meaning of their experiences