Strategies to Resist Drug Offers Among Urban American Indian Youth of the Southwest: An Enumeration, Classification, and Analysis by Substance and Offeror

Abstract

This study explores the drug resistance strategies of urban American Indian adolescents when they encounter people offering them alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. Data were collected in 2005 from 11 female and 9 male adolescents who self-identified as American Indian and attended two urban middle schools in the southwestern United States. In two focus groups—one at each school site—the youth described their reactions to 25 hypothetical substance offer scenarios drawn from real-life narratives of similar youth. Qualitative analysis of their 552 responses to the scenarios generated 14 categories. Half of the responses were strategies reported most often by nonnative youth (refuse, explain, leave, and avoid). Using ecodevelopmental theory, the responses were analyzed for indications of culturally specific ways of resisting substance offers, such as variation by specific substance and relationship to the person offering. Study limitations are noted along with suggestive implications for future research on culturally appropriate prevention approaches for urban American Indian youth.

Keywords :

• urban American Indian youth
• drug resistance strategies
• substance offers
• resiliency

THE AUTHORS

Stephen Kulis, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1984), is Cowden Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University (ASU) and Director of Research at the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center at ASU, which is a Center of Excellence funded by the NIH/National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. His research has focused on cultural processes in health disparities, such as the role of gender and ethnic identity in youth drug use and prevention interventions; cultural adaptation of prevention programs for ethnic minority youth; contextual neighborhood and school-level influences on individual-level risk and protective behaviors; gender and racial inequities in professional careers; and the organizational sources of ethnic and gender discrimination.

Leslie Jumper Reeves, M.A., is a Faculty Associate at the Arizona State University (ASU). Through ASU's Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center, she develops and implements culturally specific substance abuse interventions. An enrolled Western Band Cherokee tribal member, her research examines the effects of oral narrative on identity and resiliency within Urban American Indian families.

Patricia Allen Dustman, Ed.D., taught for 5 years before beginning her administrative career. In Ohio, she served as Middle School Assistant Principal, Elementary Principal, High School Principal, Assistant Superintendent, and Superintendent of Schools. Relocating to Arizona, she was an Administrator with the Scottsdale Public Schools before becoming Superintendent of Schools in Queen Creek, AZ. She joined the research team at the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC) in 1999 as the Director of Development and Implementation. She is heavily involved in the field-based projects that incorporate community-based participatory research methods. Her primary responsibilities include ongoing coordination with research sites, IRB approvals, development of implementation strategies for field-based projects, and grant proposal facilitation.

Marissa O'Neill, M.S.W., is a Ph.D. candidate in social work at the Arizona State University. Her research interests include Indian child welfare, the foster care system, and attachment.

Notes

1 The reader is reminded that the concepts of “risk” and “protective factors” are often noted in the literature, without adequately delineating their dimensions (linear and nonlinear), their “demands”, the critical necessary conditions (endogenous as well as exogenous ones, micro to macro levels), which are necessary for either posited process to operate (begin, continue, become anchored and integrate, change as de facto realities change, cease, etc.) or not to and whether their underpinnings are theory driven, empirically based, individual and/or systemic stake holder bound, based upon “principles of faith,” or what. This is necessary to clarify if these terms and their posited processes are not to remain as yet additional shibboleths in a field of many stereotypes. Editor's note.

2 The journal's style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Editor's note.