Is Parent–Adolescent Drug Talk Always Protective? Testing A New Scale of Drug Talk Styles in Relation to Adolescent Personal Norms, Parental Injunctive Norms, Substance Use Intentions, and Behaviors

ABSTRACT

According to parent-offspring drug talk (PODT) model, the specificity of drug talk styles is identified by the timing and directness of communication about substance use between parent and adolescent (e.g., situated direct, ongoing direct, situated indirect, and ongoing indirect talk style). Given the limitation of the original, single item measure for drug talk styles with a categorical response option, the current study proposed a new scale of drug talk styles and tested its concurrent validity. Using cross-sectional survey data (N = 2,035), confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the factor structure of the scale. Consistent with PODT model, the analysis yielded support for a four-factor structure for the drug talk styles. Next, a path analysis was employed to validate the scale. The findings suggested that situated direct talk was positively related to personal anti-substance-use norms and parental anti-substance-use injunctive norms but negatively related to smoking intention, as well as alcohol use in the past 30 days. Ongoing direct talk, however, was found to be positively associated with alcohol and marijuana use in the past 30 days. Research implications and future directions are discussed.

Notes

1. Parents were informed in writing about the surveys and given the opportunity to review all questions; those who did not wish for their child to participate returned a signed form removing the youth from data collection.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Bureau to the University of Tennessee (S-INLEC-13-GR-1012: Jonathan Pettigrew, Principal Investigator) and Arizona State University (S-INLEC-16-GR-1005: Jonathan Pettigrew, Principal Investigator). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the United States Department of State.