ECPN Student Poster Contestant: Exploring Influence of Triadic Family Relationship Profiles on Adolescents’ Early Substance Initiation

Introduction: The importance of preventing adolescent substance use within family contexts has been highlighted by a large number of previous studies. Both positive parent-adolescent and interparental relationships are robust protective factors for adolescent substance use. Most prior studies are variable-centered, which limits our understanding of how unique patterns of family relationship affect adolescent substance use. Thus, this study adopted a person-centered analysis to explore profiles of warmth and hostility in mother-father-adolescent triadic relationships and how these profiles are associated with adolescents’ early substance initiation.

Methods: This study was conducted with a sample of 698 families and their adolescent children (52% were girls; age: M = 11.3, SD = .49). In 6^th grade, mothers, fathers, and adolescents reported on warmth and hostility in dyadic parent-child and interparental relationships. The resulting set of scores for each family were used to identify profiles of triadic relationships using latent profile analysis (LPA). We then examined prevalence of substance use initiation for each identified profile based on adolescent report in 8^th grade.

Results: A five-profile solution yielded the optimal solution when comparing models with 1 to 7 profiles. A cohesive family profile was characterized by high warmth and low hostility in all dyads; a distressed family profile was characterized by high hostility and low warmth in all dyads; a compensatory family profile was characterized by low warmth and high hostility in mother-father dyads and adolescent perceived high parental warmth; a hostile parent-adolescent family profile was characterized by average mother-father relationships and high hostility in parent-adolescent dyads; and a disengaged family profile was characterized by low warmth and low hostility in all dyads. Overall group comparison tests indicated that there were significant differences across the five profiles with respect to substance use initiation. Our findings indicated that the distressed and hostile parent-adolescent families had the highest levels of early initiation of alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana compared with cohesive, compensatory, and disengaged families. Adolescents in hostile parent-adolescent families also had high levels of inhalant initiation.

Conclusion: These findings have significant implications for substance use prevention design by highlighting the importance of intervention among distressed and hostile parent-adolescent families during early adolescence in order to reduce early substance initiation.