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This study examined the extent to which individual differences in alcohol and marijuana use among 167 Black university students could be accounted for by degree of ethnic identity. After controlling for year in school, sex, and friends' substance use, higher levels of ethnic identity indeed were found to be significantly related to lower beer/hard liquor use, wine use, and marijuana use, accounting for approximately 31%, 6%, and 4% of the variance, respectively. For marijuana use, however, friends' substance use accounted for more of the variance (13%) than did ethnic identity (4%).

Current knowledge points to several psychosocial risk factors, each of which correlates with drug abuse but does not explain all of the variance. Predictive studies have shown that combinations of these risk factors predict drug abuse better than any single risk factor does, but no one combination reliably predicts better than any other. These findings suggest, as stress theory postulates, that number of risk factors predicts drug abuse better than any particular set of risk factors.