Abstract: Girls Just Want to Know Where to Have Fun: Preventing Substance Use Initiation in an Under Resourced Community through the Leisure Focused Healthwise (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

Schedule:

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Pacific A (Hyatt Regency San Francisco)

* noted as presenting author

Mojdeh Motamedi, MS, Graduate Student, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Linda Lee Caldwell, PhD, Professor, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Lisa Wegner, PhD, Professor, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa

Edward Allan Smith, PhD, Director, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Damon Evan Jones, PhD, Research Assistant Professor, Penn State University, University Park, PA

Introduction:

This study examined whether youth substance use (SU) can be prevented by targeting perceived leisure opportunities in the community as part of HealthWise, a high school-based leisure focused prevention program. Promoting healthy leisure opportunities may be key to preventing SU initiation as SU is commonly associated with boredom, having nothing better to do, sensation-seeking, and wanting to be accepted by peers doing similar community activities. Having healthy leisure opportunities may be particularly important for girls as they may experience different contextual constraints on how they use their free time, especially in under-resourced communities. Specifically, in Cape Town, South Africa townships, girls report being more constrained than boys as they spend more time in religious and domestic activities while boys are able to spend more time in sports and unstructured activities, like hanging out on street corners. Perceptions about such opportunities may influence beliefs around future returns (e.g., educational/occupational) for investing in school and avoiding risky behaviors, like SU. Thus, this study examined how the perception of available community leisure opportunities may reduce the likelihood of initiating SU for girls versus boys and whether perceived leisure opportunities mediates the effect of HealthWise on reducing SU initiation.

Methods:

As this study focused on preventing the initiation of “gateway” drugs, we selected three overlapping subsamples from the full sample of youth (N=6,253) based on whether, by the start of the intervention (the start of 8^th grade), they had not initiated using: alcohol (N=4,264), cigarettes (N=3,716), and marijuana (N=4,809). Sets of path analyses for each gender and substance were used to test the hypotheses that HealthWise would reduce the likelihood of initiating SU by the end of the intervention (by the start of 10^th grade) and perceived leisure opportunities would mediate this path.

Results:

HealthWise directly reduced the likelihood of SU initiation and increased the amount of perceived leisure opportunities among girls but not boys. Perceived leisure opportunities mediated the effect of HealthWise on reduced SU initiation among girls but not boys.

Conclusions:

This is the first study to demonstrate how experimentally targeting leisure through an intervention can increase perceived leisure opportunities and thereby, prevent SU initiation for a specific population. The importance of considering the context of gender, age, and location will be discussed.

Abstract: Girls Just Want to Know Where to Have Fun: Preventing Substance Use Initiation in an Under Resourced Community through the Leisure Focused Healthwise (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

338 Girls Just Want to Know Where to Have Fun: Preventing Substance Use Initiation in an Under Resourced Community through the Leisure Focused Healthwise