Critical Appraisal of Music Festival Attendees’ Illicit Drug Use

Running head: CRITICAL APPRAISAL
CRITICAL APPRAISAL
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

CRITICAL APPRAISAL1
Full Reference
Day, N., Criss, J., Griffiths, B., Gujral, S. K., John-Leader, F., Johnston, J., & Pit, S. (2018).
Music festival attendees’ illicit drug use, knowledge and practices regarding drug
content and purity: a cross-sectional survey. Harm reduction journal, 15(1), 1
Introduction
The essay highlights the concept of critical appraisal of the journal article based on
the concept of drug checking and high prevalence rate of drug consumption among young
people in any festivals. The attitude and behaviour of the young adults towards drug
consumption is explained in the research article (Measham, 2019). Critical appraisal of
research article is considered as the systematic process that is sued to recognize the strengths
and weakness of the research article to evaluate the validity and usefulness of the research
findings. The essay consists of two different parts were the first part explains the critical
appraisal of the research article that revolves around the concept of drug checking in music
festival and the attitude of young people present in the music festival regarding consumption
of illicit drug. The second part of the essay will revolve around the case study of Emily, who
was going to attend a music festival in Melbourne and the application of drug checking on
her (Day et al., 2018).
Part A- Critical Appraisal
Authorship
Authorship is defined as the process of providing origin, affiliation and specialty of
the contributors or authors who are accountable for generating an academic journal articles
and further emphasising on the key evidence of the article (Kamuf, 2018). Authorship is the
process of providing recognition to the included authors who have contributed to the

CRITICAL APPRAISAL2
generation of research article and thus are responsible of their own work. In the journal
articles there were eight researchers who have contributed and participated in the research
and published the paper on consumption of illicit drug by participants of music festival. Out
of eight, seven scholars were affiliated from School of Medicine in University of western
Sydney situated in Sydney, Australia (Day et al., 2018).
Research Question
The aim of the research paper as explained by the researchers was to explore the
method and quantity of drug consumers within the young generation of population in
between the age of 18 to 30 and also assess the attitude and behaviour of young people
present in the music festival (Day et al., 2018). The paper revolves around the concept of
drug checking and evaluating the behaviour of the participants regarding consumption of
illicit drug. The researcher had focused on drug checking concept because the drug
consumption rate is extremely high in young generation and they tend to become a drug
addict (Barratt et al., 2018). They had conducted this research on young people present in
music festival as the prevalence rate of drug consumers are high in such festivals when
compared to normal people.
Research Design
A cross-sectional research design approach was used by the researchers. Cross-
sectional research design is used because this design includes diverse set of people with
different set of interest and psychological thinking. In the research article, 1365 adolescents
were used as participants and were included in the survey (Day et al., 2018). The group of
adolescents used were in between the age of 18 to 35, which is considered as the peak age of
drug consumption. Hence, the researcher used this age group to identify the general