Substance Use Among Adolescents in California: A Latent Class Analysis

Abstract

Data from the California Healthy Kids Survey of 7th, 9th, and 11th graders were used to identify latent classes/clusters of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use (N = 418,702). Analyses revealed four latent classes of substance use, which included nonusers (61.1%), alcohol experimenters (some recent alcohol use; 22.8%), mild polysubstance users (lifetime use of all substances with less than 3 days of recent use; 9.2%), and frequent polysubstance users (used all substances three or more times in the past month; 6.9%). The results revealed that alcohol and marijuana use are salient to California adolescents. This information can be used to target and tailor school-based prevention efforts.

Keywords :

• adolescents
• alcohol
• tobacco
• marijuana

THE AUTHORS

Tamika D. Gilreath, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. Dr. Gilreath's work focuses on health disparities, substance use, and mental health of vulnerable school-based adolescent populations in the United States, as well as international tobacco consumption among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, her work contributes to the understanding of differential behavioral health outcomes by race, ethnicity, and other social identities using latent variable modeling to explore patterns of co-occurrence of behavioral health indicators.

Ron Astor, Ph.D., is the Thor endowed professor of urban social development at the University of Southern California in the schools of Social Work and the Rossier School of Education. His work examines the role of the physical, social-organizational, and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of school violence. He also explores how schools can support students from military families. Findings from his studies have been published in more than 150 scholarly manuscripts and five books published by Oxford University Press and Columbia University, Teachers College Press.

Joey N. Estrada, Jr., Ph.D., received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He received his M.S.W. from UC Los Angeles and his Bachelor's from UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Estrada's research interests include school violence, street gang culture, school-based intervention, resiliency, and youth empowerment. His work has been published in major academic journals, and he has presented his research at various national and international research conferences. He is currently conducting research on the risk and protective factors for gang-involved youth within school communities.

Renee M. Johnson, Ph.D., completed her doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health in 2004 (Chapel Hill, NC). She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health (Boston, MA). Additionally, she is a core faculty member with the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, the Boston Medical Center Injury Prevention Center, and the Social Adjustment and Bullying Prevention Laboratory at BU School of Education (http://bu.edu/bullying). Prior to joining the Boston University faculty in 2009, she was with the Alonzo Smythe Yerby Postdoctoral Fellowship program at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Johnson studies the prevention and epidemiology of suicide, firearm injury, youth violence, and substance use, among adolescents and emerging adults. Her current research examines how neighborhood context impacts initiation of substance use, with a particular emphasis on marijuana use among low-income, urban youth. She is a member of the American Public Health Association and the Society for Prevention Research.

Rami Benbenishty, Ph.D., is working with the Israeli Ministry of Education to conduct secondary analyses of their databases and examine the relationships between school climate, victimization, and academic achievements. His work addresses multiple issues in child welfare, with a special emphasis on victimization and maltreatment of children in the family and in schools. With Dr. Ron Astor, he is developing a conceptual and methodological framework addressing the schools nested in their ecological context. He is Co-PI in a project led by Dr. Astor, funded by the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). He is in charge of ongoing formative and summative evaluation of the project.

Jennifer B. Unger, Ph.D., is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. Her research focuses on psychological, social, and cultural influences of substance use and other health risk behaviors among diverse adolescents and entertainment-education for health promotion. She also directs the Ph.D. program in Health Behavior Research at USC.