Adolescent Substance Use and Individual Beliefs That Drug Use Is Wrong: A Statewide Epidemiological Study

Abstract

Objective

Informed by cognitive dissonance theory, the current study investigated the ability of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong to predict likelihood of past year substance use abstinence as well as frequency of use at grades 8, 10, and 12.

Method

Study analyses were executed from a statewide epidemiological survey of more than 125,000 youth using multi-group Zero-Inflated Poisson regression modeling.

Results

Personal belief that drug use is wrong demonstrated the largest magnitude of effect at each grade among the individual, family, and school-based factors under examination; this finding emerged with respect to predicting past year substance use abstinence as well as rates of substance use among individuals reporting past year use. Although differences across grades were evident for the magnitude of effect within various risk and protective factors, the rank ordering in magnitude of effect between factors was consistent across grades 8, 10, and 12.

Conclusion

Current results underscore the salience of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong in explaining likelihood of past year substance use at multiple time points during adolescence.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10826084.2022.2034877 .

Keywords:

• Adolescent
• beliefs
• epidemiology
• predictors
• prevention
• substance use
• youth

Disclosure of interests

The authors report no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

Support for the development of this article was provided by the Illinois Department of Human Services (#43CZZ03292; PI: Smith). The views expressed by the authors are their own, however, and do not reflect official positions of the State of Illinois.