Abstract
A social psychology of problem behavior was employed in a longitudinal study of high school youth to predict time of onset of marijuana use. Measures of 19 personality, perceived environment, and behavioral variables among nonusers of marijuana in 1970 were shown to account for a significant amount of the variance in time of onset of use over the subsequent 2-year period (R = .61 for males and .44 for females). More important perhaps, “growth curves” of the measures plotted over the study years show that the trajectory of social-psychological development varies depending on whether and on when onset of marijuana use occurs. The findings support the importance of the concept of deviance or transition proneness in the social-psychological framework as identifying a disposition toward development and change among adolescents.
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Jessor, R. (1976). Predicting time of onset of marijuana use: A developmental study of high school youth. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 44(1), 125–134.
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Notes
- 1.
In making inference to the social-psychological variables, it is important to rule out alternative factors that might account for findings such as group differences in age or in background characteristics. Although old users were significantly older than each of the three other groups, the difference between age means was small, ranging between 3 and 5 months. Among the three groups not yet using marijuana as of 1970, however, no difference between groups was as large as 2 months and none was significant. Hence, age could not be a factor in variation in time of onset among the 1970 nonuser groups. Another way of stating this is to report that among the nonusers in 1970 the correlation between age in months and time of onset was .07. With respect to demographic attributes, there were no differences among the transition groups in father’s occupation, father’s education, or mother’s education, or in the liberalism-fundamentalism of father’s or of mother’s religious group membership.
- 2.
All references in this section to differences being significant either over time for the same group or between different groups at a given time are based on two-tailed t tests with p < .05.
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Acknowledgments
The research reported here is part of a larger, longitudinal study of “The Socialization of Problem Behavior in Youth” supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Grant AA-00232, R. Jessor, principal investigator. The author is indebted to John Finney and Shirley L. Jessor for their invaluable contributions.
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Jessor, R. (2017). Understanding the Initiation of Marijuana Use. In: Problem Behavior Theory and Adolescent Health . Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51349-2_9
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