Racial/ethnic differences in alcohol use trajectories among adolescents involved in child welfare

Lifetime use of alcohol and cannabis among U.S. adolescents across age: Exploring differential patterns by sex and race/ethnicity using the 2019 NSDUH data

Background

Early use of alcohol and cannabis is associated with health and social problems. It is unclear how lifetime use changes for each additional year of age during adolescence, and whether this change varies by sex and race/ethnicity. This study characterized lifetime rates of alcohol and cannabis use by age among 12- to 17-year-old American youth and explored differential patterns by sex and race/ethnicity.

Methods

Data were obtained from the 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Analyses were restricted to 12-17-year-olds who were non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, or Hispanic/Latino (n = 11,830). We estimated the increase in lifetime use of alcohol and cannabis by age for the full sample and stratified by sex and race/ethnicity. Slopes of the regression lines were compared to assess differential patterns across groups.

Results

In these cross-sectional analyses, reported lifetime use increased substantially from age 12 to 17 for alcohol (6.4 % to 53.2 %) and cannabis (1.3 % to 35.9 %). The increase in lifetime alcohol use was slightly, but not significantly, steeper among girls than boys (F1,8 = 3.40, p = 0.09). White and Latino youth showed similar rates of increase in lifetime alcohol use, which was significantly flatter among Black youth (F2,12=21.26, p<0.0001). Latino youth had a slightly, but not significantly, steeper increase in lifetime cannabis use than White and Black youth (F2,12=3.17, p = 0.07).

Conclusions

Reports of lifetime alcohol and cannabis use substantially increase from age 12 to 17 and the rates are different according to sex and race/ethnicity, highlighting the need for early and tailored substance use prevention in adolescents.

Sociodemographic differences in youth alcohol sipping's nomological network

BACKGROUND

Previous research has established that certain features of personality (e.g., impulsivity), psychopathology (e.g., impulsivity, mood disorder, thought disorder), and contextual factors (e.g., parenting, parental alcohol use) are associated with an increased likelihood of having sipped alcohol in youth, and substance involvement and problems in adolescence and adulthood. What is less clear from the existing literature is whether well-established risk factors of substance use are consistent across sociodemographic characteristics (i.e., gender, race/ethnicity, religious affiliation, income, parental education).

METHODS

We used a large, community sample of 9- and 10-year-olds (N = 11,872; 53% female) to examine whether various sociodemographic characteristics moderate the associations between sipping behavior and its various well-established correlates (e.g., impulsivity, behavioral inhibition and activation, psychopathology, parenting, and family conflict).

RESULTS

There were small mean level differences in sipping across sociodemographic characteristics. Across sociodemographic characteristics, however, sipping was fairly uniformly associated with youth-reported impulsivity, behavioral activation, prodromal psychosis symptoms, mood and externalizing disorder diagnoses, family environment, and parental alcohol consumption indices. Effects were sometimes slightly more pronounced among groups for which alcohol consumption is relatively nonnormative: Sipping among female youth was slightly more associated with thought disorder psychopathology than among male youth (D = 0.07), and was slightly more associated with some aspects of psychopathology and impulsivity for Black youth than White and Hispanic youth (Ds were 0.07 and 0.09).

CONCLUSIONS

Broadly, our findings suggest that the psychosocial correlates of precocious alcohol use are relatively consistent across sociodemographic factors.