Ethnic Differences in Competence and Adolescent Drug Use

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DESCRIPTION: (provided by applicant) School-based drug abuse prevention programs that combine social and personal competence enhancement with refusal skills training have been shown to reduce adolescent substance use. Etiology research is needed to clarify how the components of effective prevention programs work. Little is known about the mediating mechanisms and moderating factors that explain how and when competence skills are protective and whether these mechanisms change over the course of adolescence. For example, in addition to being better equipped to resist peer influences, socially competent youth may perceive fewer social benefits to engaging in drug use compared to youth with poor interpersonal negotiation skills. Youth with good cognitive and behavioral self-management strategies (i.e., personal competence) may succeed in developmental tasks and experience a sense of mastery and psychological well-being that is protective in terms of drug involvement. Because rates of substance use differ among ethnic and gender subgroups of youth, it is important to determine if competence-based etiological models apply to different subgroups of adolescents, in particular inner-city minority youth in high-nisk settings. A primary aim of the proposed research is to develop, test, and refine several etiologic models that focus on social and personal competence skills and adolescent substance use over the course of adolescence, and to examine these models among two distinct samples from 7th grade through the 12th grade: a predominantly white, suburban sample (N=3,549), and a largely minority, inner-city sample (N=2,229). This will be accomplished through secondary data analysis of control group participants from two school-based drug abuse prevention trials. The proposed research aims to elucidate how competence skills influence the initiation, escalation, and maintenance of drug use during adolescence by examining mediational and moderational models and cross-validating them across ethnic and gender subgroups. By improving our understanding of how drug use develops over the course of adolescence among youth of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, a long-term goal of the proposed research is to inform the development of effective prevention programs for ethnically diverse populations, and ultimately, to reduce rates of substance abuse and addiction that contribute to health disparities among racial/ethnic populations.