Addiction in textbooks: A content analysis on secondary school textbooks

This study aims to scan and undertake a content analysis of the secondary school textbooks approved by the Board of Education of the Ministry of National Education in terms of addiction. For this purpose, 20 textbooks were analyzed on sentence basis. In the first step, addiction-related categories, codes and sub-codes were developed. A total of 61 codes were identified under 6 categories: "Technology Addiction", "Tobacco Addiction", "Substance Addiction", "Behavioral Addictions", "Healthy Living" and "Addiction Descriptors". The second step assessed sentence frequency and message attribute of the identified codes. Based on their content, messages were classified into six groups: "visual support", "warning", "questioning", "negative guidance", "positive guidance" and "ambiguous". The category distributions (%) and frequencies (f) of the addiction-related codes were as follows: "Healthy Living" 38.7%(f=492), "Technology Addiction" 34.9%(f=444), "Addiction Descriptors" 11.0%(f=139), "Substance Addiction" 7.2%(f=92), "Behavioural Addiction" 4.9%(f=62), and "Tobacco Addiction" 3.4%(f=43). When examining the frequency values (f) of the message attributes classified in the addiction sub-dimensions, the categories with the highest frequency (f) were healthy living for "visual support" (f=72), technology addiction for "warning" (f=113), healthy living for "questioning" (f=69), technology addiction for "negative guidance" (f=19) and "positive guidance" (f=58), and healthy living for "ambiguous" messages (f=243).The category of tobacco addiction had the lowest frequency of "visual support" (f=2), "warning" (f=27), and "questioning" (f=3) message attributes. The findings reveal that the issue of "healthy living" iss emphasized the most in secondary school textbooks regarding addiction, but the majority of the intended messages are ambiguous, the messages for the categories of "behavioural addiction" and "substance addiction" are very few, and the messages in the category of "tobacco addiction" are both qualitatively and quantitatively inadequate.