No abstract

No abstract

The extent to which youth perceive their neighborhood to be at risk was found to be directly related to a series of life-style and drug use context variables. Further, the extent of drug use (nonuse, only alcohol, both alcohol and marijuana) was directly related to two of these variables, but inversely related to the extent their friends used "hard" drugs. These results indicate the critical importance of incorporating a measure of perceived risk into drug studies of adolescents, and highlight the need to view youth as motivated actors, guiding their own behavior in an attempt to actualize self-defined values. This is in direct contrast to most theoretical perspectives which regard this age group as merely responding to powerful external influences.

The present paper reviews the various sets of variables that have been found to relate to youths' drug use. It considers various experiences, deriving from our accumulated knowledge, which need to be incorporated into research into the etiology of drug use, and discusses methodological strategies and models of analysis which show promise of improving the state of the art in this field. Documentation is provided concerning the usefulness of screening subsets of cases on relevant risk variables prior to data analysis.

No abstract