Longitudinal Relations Among Negative Affect, Substance Use, and Peer Deviance During the Transition From Middle to Late Adolescence

Abstract

The transition from middle to late adolescence brings challenges that increase risk for emotional, behavioral, and social problems. The nature of the associations among these types of problems is poorly understood. This National Institute on Drug Abuse–funded study examined longitudinal relations among negative affect, substance use, and peer deviance from ages 16 to 18 years. Multiwave youth and parent questionnaire data collected from 429 sixth graders (222 girls) and their families residing in the rural Midwestern United States and recruited in 1993 were analyzed via structural equation modeling. Consistent with the self-medication hypothesis, negative affect statistically predicted increased substance use over time. Implications for theory and prevention are discussed and the study's limitations are noted.

Keywords:

• negative affect
• substance use
• peer deviance
• adolescence
• longitudinal

Notes

¹ The reader is referred to Hills's criteria for causation, which were developed in order to help assist researchers and clinicians determine if risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated. (Hill, A. B. (1965). The environment and disease: associations or causation? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 58:295–300.) Editor's note.

² Note that the current analyses were based on data from two conditions of a larger prevention trial conducted at Iowa State University (ISU): the control condition and a Preparing for the Drug Free Years (PDFY) condition. PDFY (currently called Guiding Good Choices) is a universal substance use prevention program developed at the University of Washington (UW). Data from these two conditions were available to the UW investigative team, which conducted the analyses, via an agreement from investigators at ISU. The larger trial includes an additional intervention condition, the Iowa Strengthening Families Program (ISFP) condition, that is based on work conducted solely at ISU; for this reason, data from families in the ISFP condition were not available to the UW team and are not included here.