Neighborhoods, Family, and Substance Use: Comparisons of the Relations across Racial and Ethnic Groups

Abstract

This study examines how substance use among adolescents is related to several risk and protective factors derived from two ecological contexts: the neighborhood and the family. It explicitly investigates how the relationships between substance use and the factors vary across different racial and ethnic groups. Findings suggest many common correlates and processes of substance use for adolescents, regardless of race or ethnicity, including that neighborhood safety is associated with substance use. There are also some racial and ethnic group differences in relationships, including that low attachment to and lack of social opportunities in neighborhoods more strongly predict substance use among whites than among other racial and ethnic groups and that family management decreases the relationship between neighborhood safety and substance use among African Americans. A better understanding of the associations among factors that influence substance use across racial and ethnic subgroups can help effectively target preventive interventions for different groups.Over the past 2 decades, numerous etiological studies have investigated the origins of and pathways to problem behaviors for youth. Such behaviors include substance use, aggressive and nonaggressive delinquent offenses, negative school behaviors, and risky sexual behaviors (e.g., Hawkins, Catalano, and Miller 1992; Hawkins et al. 2000). The studies identify several individual characteristics that predict problem behaviors. These studies also suggest that the developmental context of youth is a source of both risk and protection for such behaviors. Contexts typically include family, peers, school, and neighborhoods (Bogenschneider 1996). For example, neighborhood poverty, lack of neighborhood safety, and lack of social cohesion among neighbors are found to predict problems among youth (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993;Sampson 1997;Hill and Herman-Stahl 2002). Factors related to the family context, including parenting strategies and youth's affective relationships with parents, also emerge as strong determinants of youth problems (Steinberg, Brown, and Dornbusch 1996;Huebner and Howell 2003). This article, while also considering other factors, focuses on how two of these contexts, neighborhood and family, predict substance use among youth.Individual, neighborhood, and family factors are known to predict problem behaviors, but it is not clear how these factors operate together to influence the development of problem and positive behaviors among youth (Furstenberg et al. 1998;Griffin et al. 1999;Duncan and Raudenbush 2001;Hill and Herman-Stahl 2002). Moreover, it is not clear how interrelationships among individual, family, and neighborhood factors vary across racial and NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript ethnic groups in predicting youth problem behaviors (McLoyd et al. 2000). The current study seeks to improve understanding of these issues. Neighborhood Risk FactorsNumerous studies find that neighborhood fact...

A prospective study of marijuana use change and cessation among adolescents

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