Developmental trajectories of substance use from early adolescence to young adulthood: Gender and racial/ethnic differences

By Pan Chen, K. Jacobson. Journal of Adolescent Health, 2011

653 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose The current study examined gender and racial/ethnic (Hispanics, Non-Hispanic Caucasians, Non-Hispanic African Americans, and Non-Hispanic Asians) differences in developmental trajectories of alcohol use, heavy drinking, smoking, and marijuana use from early adolescence to young adulthood using a nationally representative sample. Methods Participants from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N=20,160) reported rates of alcohol use, heavy drinking, smoking and marijuana use between the ages of 12 and 34. Data analyses were completed using longitudinal multilevel modeling analyses. Results Levels of substance use increased from early adolescence to middle 20s, and then declined thereafter. Females showed higher levels of substance use in early adolescence, although males exhibited greater changes overtime and higher levels of use in mid-adolescence and early adulthood. Overall, Hispanic youth had higher initial rates of substance use, while Caucasian adolescents showed higher rates of change and had the highest levels of substance use from mid-adolescence through the early 30s. Racial/ethnic differences largely disappeared after age 30, except that African Americans showed higher final levels of smoking and marijuana use than the other racial/ethnic groups. Results provide evidence for both similarities and differences in general patterns of development and in gender and racial/ethnic differences across different forms of substance use. Conclusion Findings from the current study suggest that the critical periods for intervention and prevention of substance use may differ across gender and race/ethnicity, and that future research needs to identify common and unique mechanisms underlying developmental patterns of different forms of substance use.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/058d781e3bba4f261025f8535a67bc1974905d6a

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Citations in the corpus

The WHO World Mental Health Surveys International College Student Project: Prevalence and Distribution of Mental Disorders (2018, neutral): “…found to be small, but with women having higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders than men, men having higher rates of substance use disorders than women, and socioeconomic background being inversely related to prevalence of all disorders (Chen & Jacobson, 2012; Eisenberg, Hunt, & Speer, 2013).”
Trajectories of Adolescent Alcohol Use by Gender and Early Initiation Status (2016, background): “Although relatively few studies have examined racial/ethnic differences in adolescent alcohol use patterns (Chen & Jacobson, 2012), findings from some studies suggest that adolescent alcohol use patterns may differ by race/ ethnicity and socioeconomic class (Chen, Yi, Williams, & Fade, 2009;…”