Doping, or performance enhancing drug use, has long been a social and health problem among athletes. Despite the issues associated with doping and the illegality of using these drugs, little criminological research has examined why athletes engage in this deviant behavior. The present study seeks to do so by applying key theoretical concepts derived from, and testing the predictive efficiency of, situational action theory on professional athletes’ past, current, and future performance enhancing drug use. We employ self-report data from a random sample of 680 professional athletes from Rasht, Iran. Ordinary least squares regression is used to analyze these data. Findings suggest that crime propensity and criminogenic exposure increase athletes’ doping behavior. In addition, we find the interaction term between crime propensity and criminogenic exposure influences performance enhancing drug use among professional athletes, while increasing the model’s predictive power. Finally, in contrast to situational action theory, we find that known correlates of deviance (education, age, and gender) still influence athletes’ doping behavior even when key theoretical variables are included in the model.

中文翻译：

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增强职业运动员使用毒品的性能：测试从情境行为理论衍生的关键理论概念的适用性

长期以来，服用兴奋剂（即提高药物使用性能）一直是运动员的社会和健康问题。尽管存在与兴奋剂相关的问题以及使用这些药物的非法性，但很少有犯罪学研究调查运动员为何从事这种异常行为。本研究旨在通过运用源自情境动作理论的关键理论概念并测试情境行为理论对职业运动员过去，现在和将来增强毒品使用的预测效率来做到这一点。我们使用来自伊朗拉什特（Rasht）的680名专业运动员的随机样本的自我报告数据。普通最小二乘回归分析这些数据。研究结果表明，犯罪倾向和犯罪源性暴露会增加运动员的兴奋剂行为。此外，我们发现犯罪倾向与犯罪暴露之间的相互作用项会影响职业运动员的表现，从而提高他们的吸毒能力，同时提高模型的预测能力。最后，与情境行为理论相反，我们发现，即使模型中包含关键的理论变量，已知的偏差（教育程度，年龄和性别）的相关因素仍会影响运动员的兴奋剂行为。