Individual, Family, and School Correlates across Patterns of High School Poly-substance Use

Abstract

Background: Recent popularity in e-cigarette use among high school students and the legalization of marijuana across many states resulted in new patterns of poly-substance use (PSU). Objective: The purpose of this study is to understand contemporary patterns of PSU and their associations with individual social-emotional characteristics (sensation seeking, perceived harm, life satisfaction) and social-contextual factors (parental involvement, school norms, academics, and behaviors). Methods: Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify patterns of PSU among 12th-grade students (n = 8417) from the 2016 Monitoring the Future project. Multinomial logistic regression was used to understand the relationship among individual characteristics, social-contextual factors, and patterns of PSU. Results: From the LCA, three patterns of PSU were identified: (1) low-use (72.2%); (2) pre-dominantly marijuana use with some co-occurring substance use (23.8%); and (3) high PSU (4.0%). Results indicate that students with pre-dominant marijuana use were differentiated from those with PSU by having higher perceived harm of electronic and regular cigarette, heavy alcohol use, and better academic grades. Furthermore, students with both polysubstance and pre-dominant marijuana use, when compared to those with low-use, had lower life satisfaction, higher sensation seeking, lower perceived harm of substance use, poorer grades, and more disciplinary problems. Conclusion/Importance: Findings draw attention to the importance of understanding levels of life satisfaction, sensation seeking, perceived harm, academic grades, and disciplinary problems as they pertain to contemporary patterns of PSU. Schools should consider a tailored and multi-tiered approach to addressing students’ substance use.

Keywords:

• Poly-substance use
• sensation seeking
• life satisfaction
• parental involvement
• school experience

Acknowledgments

The Monitoring the Future data used in this study were obtained through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. A version of this manuscript was presented at the 2018 Society for Social Work Research (SSWR) Annual Conference in Washington, DC.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Compliance with ethical standards

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. This study was exempted from human subjects review by the authors’ Institutional Review Board because it is a secondary analysis of a public use data set that was stripped of all identifiers. This study was not supported by any grants provided to the authors.