Negative Affect, Delinquency, and Alcohol Use Among Rural and Urban African-American Adolescents: A Brief Report

Abstract

A model of negative affect and alcohol use was replicated on a sample of African-American high school students. Participants (N = 5,086) were randomly selected from a previously collected data set and consisted of 2,253 males and 2,833 females residing in both rural and urban locations. Multivariate analysis of covariance and structural equation modeling were performed. While fit indices suggest that the original model does apply to African-Americans, adding delinquency as a mediator significantly increased the variance accounted for in alcohol use. There were differences in the strength of model relationships based on gender and location of residence.

KEYWORDS:

• adolescent
• African-American
• alcohol
• negative affect
• rural

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Ruth W. Edwards of the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research, Colorado State University, for access to her data.

Notes

^{a, c, d, f, g} p < .001. ^{b, e} p < .05.

NIDA grant RO1 DA09349, Adolescent Drug Use in Rural America. Principal investigator: Ruth W. Edwards, PhD, Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research, Colorado State University.

The negative affect model produced a Heywood case (i.e., negative error variance) for the depression factor, so the error variance of depression was constrained to zero, as recommended by Dillon, Kumar, and Mulani (1987).

We tested the possibility of partial mediation. The direct path from negative affect to alcohol use (Γ = .00, n.s.) did not significantly improve model fit (▵χ² = .12, ▵df = 1, n.s.), supporting full mediation.