Immigrant advantage? Substance use among Latin American immigrant and native-born youth in Spain

Abstract

This article reports the results of a descriptive study conducted with middle school and high school age youth residing in northwestern Spain. The main outcome of the study is to advance knowledge about the drug use attitudes and behaviors of immigrants versus native youth in a social context where Latin American immigrants share a common language and a set of core cultural norms with the host society. The research was conducted by a bi-national Spain–US research team as a preliminary study leading to the development of joint culturally appropriate prevention interventions for youth in the northern region of Galicia, Spain. Surveys were administered in Spring 2005 to 817 students in 7th to 10th grades in 10 urban, secondary schools with high immigrant enrollment. The sample included Spanish natives (two-thirds) and Latin American immigrants (one-third), mainly from Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela. Multiple regression analyses predicted substance use intentions, and a composite variable measuring lifetime and last 30-day frequency and amount of alcohol, cigarette and marijuana use. Controlling for the fact that the immigrant students were generally older and performing less well academically than natives, and for other predictors, Latin American immigrant youth were less at risk than native youth on their intentions to use substances and on their reported actual substance use. In a mediational analysis, most of the key explanatory variables in youth substance use etiology failed to account for the immigrant versus native differences, including a range of risk and protective factors for substance use, substance use norms, strength of ethnic identity, and degree of social integration within native-born social networks. Differential access to drugs mediated the immigrant–native gap in substance use intentions but did not mediate differences in actual substance use.

Keywords:

• immigrants
• youth
• substance use
• ethnic identity

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by an internal research grant awarded by the College of Public Programs of ASU and by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse award funding the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC) at Arizona State University (R24 DA13937).

Notes

1. The standardized estimate of the immigrant versus native effect ranged from 0.07 to 0.09 in models 1 through 4; it increased to 0.14 in model 5 and to 0.13 in model 7; and dropped to 0.04 in model 6 and to 0.02 in model 8. Standardized effects of similar size to those in Table 2 were also obtained in alternate models that restricted the sample to cases that had complete data on all predictors.

2. Additional model tests demonstrated that this reversal could be attributed to the simultaneous inclusion of two other predictors (positive drug expectancies and drug-using friends) which were moderately and positively correlated with the anti-social conduct scale. Variance inflation factors in Table 2 model tests, however, did not indicate there was unacceptable multi-collinearity among these or any of the other predictors.

3. The standardized estimate of the immigrant versus native effect ranged from 0.09 to 0.12 in models 1 through 4 and model 6; it increased to 0.15 in model 5 and to 0.13 in model 7; and dropped to 0.04 in model 8.

4. Although the VIF diagnostics did not indicate a problematic level of collinearity, grade level was related closely to another predictor – age. Because of educational interruptions related to migration and different educational systems in Latin America and Spain, Latin American immigrant youth could be expected to be older than their native-born classmates, as well as at different grade levels. These differences could operate separately or in tandem. Thus, it was desirable to control for both of these related variables simultaneously unless they were found to be unacceptably collinear.