School, Friends, and Substance Use: Gender Differences on the Influence of Attitudes Toward School and Peer Networks on Cannabis Involvement

Introduction: The school environment is extremely salient in young adolescents’ lives. Adolescents who have unfavorable attitudes toward school and teachers are at elevated risk for dropping out of school, poor academic performance, and academic unpreparedness, as well as for engaging in behavioral health risks, including delinquency, association with deviant peers and substance use. A robust literature has demonstrated the effect of peers on adolescent substance use. Cannabis use in particular has been shown to be embedded within the peer context, suggesting peers are an important factor in understanding youth cannabis use. Peer network health – a summation of the positive and negative behaviors in which one’s peer group engages that may influence youth – may be one way by which attitudes toward school exert influence on youth substance use. Further, the influence of school and peers appears to vary by gender.

Methods: We sought to examine the influence of school attitudes and peer influences on cannabis use and how these relationships varied by gender. Utilizing a sample of 248 primarily African American urban adolescents, we tested a moderated mediation model to determine if the indirect effect of attitude to school on cannabis involvement through peer network health was conditioned on gender. Attitude toward school measured at baseline was the predictor (X), peer network health measured at 6 months was the mediator (M), cannabis involvement measured at 24 months was the outcome (Y), and gender was the moderator (W). We controlled for individual level risk factors such as age, gender, race, neighborhood socioeconomic status and baseline cannabis involvement.

Results: We present evidence of both simple mediation and moderated mediation, such that negative attitudes toward school were indirectly associated with increased cannabis involvement through peer network health for girls, but not for boys. Thus, girls in our sample were more likely than boys to have their negative attitudes to school be related to increasing offers to use cannabis through their peer networks.

Conclusions: Results of this study align with previous research that has shown that school and peer influences can act to put youth at risk of substance use. Findings specifically extend the growing literature on offers to use, demonstrating longitudinal pathways by which adolescents become increasingly involved in cannabis use. Implications from these results point to opportunities to leverage the dynamic associations among school experiences, peers, and cannabis involvement, particularly for African American adolescent girls.