title: Understanding early-onset drug and alcohol outcomes among youth: the role of family structure, social factors, and interpersonal perceptions of use.
abstract: Research on adolescents focuses increasingly on features of the family in predicting and preventing illicit substance use. Multivariate analyses of data from the National Survey of Parents and Youth (N=4173) revealed numerous significant differences on risk variables associated with family structure on adolescent drug-related perceptions and substance use. Youth from dual-parent households were least likely to use drugs and were monitored more closely than single-parent youth (p<0.001). A path analytic model estimated to illuminate linkages among theoretically implicated variables revealed that family income and child's gender (p<0.001), along with family structure (p<0.05), affected parental monitoring, but not parental warmth. Monitoring and warmth, in turn, predicted adolescents' social and interpersonal perceptions of drug use (p<0.001), and both variables anticipated adolescents' actual drug use one year later (p<0.001). Results reconfirm the importance of parental monitoring and warmth and demonstrate the link between these variables, adolescents' social and intrapersonal beliefs, and their use of illicit substances.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, USA. vanessa.hemovich@cgu.edu
authors.forename: Vanessa
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Hemovich
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lac
authors.forename: William D
authors.initials: WD
authors.lastname: Crano
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D000367:Age Factors; D017668:Age of Onset; D000428:Alcohol Drinking / Q000453:epidemiology*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D012931:Social Environment; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology*; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology