Explaining Adolescent Substance Use: Ethnic Disparities

Introduction: The US public school systems is still a place of intense segregation, particularly in urban school districts. This segregation has real impacts on educational achievement, something that has been widely studied, but also has the potential to impact a variety of adolescent health behaviors. Although segregation is often based on race and ethnicity, it also involves segregation by socioeconomic status as well. Ethnic and racial differences still exist in adolescent alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use. These differences put adolescents from different ethnic and racial backgrounds at greater risks for maladaptive trajectories in adulthood. The need to examine potential mediators of ethnic and racial identity as well as potential confounders of these differences is needed to understand how best to intervene with different ethnic and racial backgrounds.

Methods: Looking at both use vs no use and age of first use for alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana, we examine age at first opportunity of use as a potential mediator for ethnic differences. At the same time, we examine how family, peer, and individual differences might also explain ethnic differences in an urban sample of 7th graders from a highly segregated southwestern school district.

Results: We find that there is some evidence that opportunity to use a substance does mediate the ethnic differences on substance use and age of first use. However, many of the ethnic and racial differences went away when parent education, family ATOD use, negative peer association, and individual anti-social behavior were controlled for. In a post-hoc analysis, the relationship between the control variables and ethnicity and race was examined with clear differences found between some of the groups on these variables.

Conclusion: While ethnic and racial differences were found initially for use vs no use and age of first use, some of these differences were mediated by opportunity for use of a substance. This finding points to preventing opportunities of substance use as a potential avenue of decreasing disparities in adolescent substance use between ethnicities and races. At the same time, the loss of most of the remaining ethnic and racial differences when controlling for family, peer, and individual characteristics and the strong relationship between these variables and race and ethnicity points to the segregated nature of the schools (and by extension, neighborhoods) these adolescents live in. So preventing the opportunity to use a substance will help lessen the gap between different races and ethnicities, but until the larger issue of segregation is dealt with, these differences will persist.