“I think it is cooler, when you achieve it all by yourself”: A qualitative investigation of primary school student’s constructions of doping use and risks

The use of performance-enhancing drugs among athletes has been a concern for decades. In recent years anti-doping organizations, politicians and researchers have drawn attention to the use of doping in the general population, including the use among adolescents. Research have shown that a small but significant number of adolescents have tried performance enhancing drugs (Dunn & White, 2011; Sagoe, Andreassen, Molde, Torsheim, & Pallesen, 2015; Sandvik, Bakken, & Loland, 2018). However, it is still rather unexplored how young people in general relate to the issue of doping. This study investigates how non-using students in primary schools in Denmark construct doping use and doping users as well as perceived risks of use. 28 individual interviews and 7 focus-group interviews were carried out with 8th and 9th grade students (age 14-15) from three different Danish schools in order to gain insight into the students' social constructions of doping users, acceptable/unacceptable use and risk perceptions. The paper deploys notions of risk adopted from Lupton (1995) as well as Bengtsson and Ravn (2019) as a theoretical framework for the analysis, in order to understand how young people ascribe meaning to these issues. The paper will contribute to current knowledge about prevention of doping use among adolescents and provide an important qualitative insight into this research field, which is almost exclusively dominated by quantitative accounts as well as studies concerning current users.