Abstract
Personality, environmental, and behavioral variables representing psychosocial risk factors for adolescent problem behavior were assessed in a 1974 national sample study of over 10,000 junior and senior high school students. Significant correlations were found with marijuana use, and the relationships held across differences in age, sex, and ethnic group membership. Greater involvement in marijuana use was associated with greater value on independence than on academic achievement, lower expectations for academic achievement, lesser religiosity, greater tolerance of deviance, less compatibility between friends and parents, greater influence of friends relative to parents, greater models and support for problem behavior, greater actual involvement in other problem behaviors such as drunkenness, and less involvement in conventional behavior such as attending church. Multiple regression analyses show that this pattern of psychosocial correlates accounts for over 50 per cent of the variation in marijuana use. The pattern is nearly identical to the pattern that accounts for problem drinking in these same adolescents. The similarity of the patterns of psychosocial risk, and the substantial correlations of marijuana use with problem drinking and with other problem behaviors, suggest that marijuana use is best seen as part of a syndrome of adolescent problem behavior.
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Jessor, R., Chase, J. A., & Donovan, J. E. (1980). Psychosocial correlates of marijuana use and problem drinking in a national sample of adolescents. American Journal of Public Health, 70(6), 604–613.
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Notes
- 1.
See Jessor and Jessor, 1977, for a more elaborate discussion of the rationale underlying the variables in each system.
- 2.
Respondents were distributed across school grades as follows: 7th, 19 per cent; 8th, 18 per cent; 9th, 18 per cent; 10th, 14 per cent; 11th, 17 per cent; and 12th, 14 per cent. In terms of census regions, 20 per cent were from the Northeast, 19 per cent were from the North Central, 28 per cent were from the South, and 32 per cent were from the West. Parental distribution on the NORC occupational categories was as follows: Semiskilled, 22 per cent; Farmer, 5 per cent; Skilled, 21 per cent; Office-Sales, 16 per cent; Managerial, 18 per cent; and Professional, 19 per cent.
- 3.
A group of 808 adolescents were excluded because they had incomplete data on the four questions used to classify adolescents on involvement with marijuana. An additional 1,909 adolescents were excluded because internal checks of their data uncovered logical inconsistencies in their answers either to the questions on drinking behavior or to the questions on drug use behavior. Logically inconsistent answers may indicate non-truthful, random, or unreliable responding. The resulting group of 10,405 respondents contains abstainers as well as drinkers, unlike the sample in the earlier report on problem drinking (Donovan & Jessor, 1978) which focused solely on the drinkers.
- 4.
Chase JA and Jessor R: A Social-Psychological Analysis of Marijuana Involvement among a National Sample of Adolescents. Adolescent Drinking Behavior Project. Report No. 3, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, 1977. (Note: Report no longer available, and its main findings are included in the present paper.)
- 5.
Nearly all (89 per cent) of the noncumulative response patterns were due to the third item. In most of these cases, adolescents who had responded negatively to the other three items responded positively to this one. Since the item includes the phrase “someone very close to you,” the pattern suggests that it was the close friends who kept a supply of the drug. If this specific pattern of responses is rescored to reflect the opportunity to use marijuana, a level that would be intermediate between no use of marijuana and actual use of the drug, the reproducibility coefficient becomes .98 and the coefficient of scalability becomes .91 in the new Guttman scale (Guttman, 1950).
- 6.
That the personality predictors, when combined with the perceived environment predictors, do not add more to the explanation of marijuana involvement in this instance would seem to be due to two reasons: first, none of the personality variables assessed here is proximal to marijuana use while two of the perceived environment variables are; second, psychosocial proneness to problem behavior in the two systems is correlated as might be expected.
- 7.
It should be clear that this sample differs from that in the earlier report by Donovan and Jessor (1978) since it includes both drinkers and abstainers.
- 8.
The correlations between times drunk in the past year and each of these six variables are as follows for the males and females, respectively: drinking functions disjunctions (.36 and .34), friends’ approval for drinking (.35 and .37), friends as models for drinking (.56 and .57), friends’ pressure for marijuana use (.46 and .47), friends as models for marijuana use (.53 and .55), and psychedelics-amphetamines-barbiturates use (.45 and .46).
- 9.
Adolescents were considered problem drinkers if they had been drunk six or more times in the past year or if they had experienced negative consequences due to drinking at least twice in the past year in three or more of five different areas (trouble with teachers, criticism from dates, difficulties with friends, trouble with the police, and driving while under the influence of alcohol). The modal frequency of times drunk in the past year for the problem drinkers who have not used marijuana or other illicit drugs was about “once a month.” This is in contrast to the frequency of drunkenness of the marijuana users who were not problem drinkers or users of other illicit drugs; their modal response was between “once” and “two or three times” in the past year.
- 10.
Marijuana users who are not problem drinkers and who have not used any other illicit drugs constitute 38.1 per cent of the 2,744 marijuana users in the sample. Problem drinkers who have used no illicit drugs constitute 25.0 per cent of the 1,878 problem drinkers in the sample. It is of interest to note that less than 2 per cent of the marijuana users in the sample do not drink.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Contract No. ADM 281-750028 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (R. Jessor, principal investigator). We would like to thank Dr. Thomas C. Harford, NIAAA project officer, for his continuing interest and support of this work. The data were collected as part of the 1974 National Study of Adolescent Drinking Behavior, Attitudes, and Correlates by the Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina. We are indebted to Mr. J. Valley Rachal who directed the national study and who provided us with a complete data tape.
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Jessor, R., Chase, J.A., Donovan, J.E. (2017). Understanding Marijuana Use in a National Sample of Adolescents. In: Problem Behavior Theory and Adolescent Health . Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51349-2_12
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