Current social developmental theories of drug use often incorporate mediation processes, but it is generally unknown whether these mediation processes generalize across ethnicity and gender. In the present study, we developed a mediation model of substance use based on current theory and research and then tested the extent to which the model was moderated by gender and ethnicity (African American, European American, and Hispanic American), separately for 8th and 10th graders. The respondents were adolescents from the 1994, 1995, and 1996 cohorts of the Monitoring the Future (MTF) project, which conducts yearly in-school surveys with nationally representative samples. Multi-group, structural equation modeling (SEM) results indicated much similarity across gender and ethnicity for school success and time spent with friends as partial mediators of risk taking and parental involvement on drug use (controlling for parental education). However, there were some differences in the magnitude of indirect effects of parental involvement and risk taking on substance use for 8th-grade African American girls. Discussion focuses on the potential success of prevention efforts across different ethnicities and gender that target parent–child relationship improvement and risk taking, and considers possible culture- and gender-specific issues.
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In terms of items used in the current study, item non-response rates ranged from <1 to 5% with the exception of the sensation-seeking items; because these are at the end of the questionnaire, they have a larger non-response (approximately 23 and 12%, 8th and 10th grades, respectively). To ensure that our sample was still representative, at least in terms of relationships among variables of interest, we compared the item covariance matrices (excepting the sensation-seeking items) for those students with the sensation-seeking items to those without; the covariances were virtually identical and no significant differences were found.
The final model, with 30-day drug use as a latent construct comprised of cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana use, was compared with three separate models where drug use was a single indicator for each drug (i.e., cigarette use, alcohol use, or marijuana use). Findings from these single-indicator models were similar to those reported in this study for the latent three indicator construct.
A potential problem with the maximum likelihood estimation is the assumption of multivariate normality. We were not as concerned about this issue as we might have been if we had a smaller sample, because maximum likelihood tends to be more robust with large sample sizes. As a cautionary measure, because the modal response for 30-day cigarette, alcohol, or drug use was “no use,” the final model results were replicated using the generalized least squares estimation procedure because it does not assume multivariate normality (Hayduk, 1987). The pathways were virtually identical, and in all cases the fit indices were the same or provided a slightly better fit of the model using generalized least squares estimation.
We considered the possibility that single-parent households might moderate the relations between parental involvement and other constructs. Auxiliary analyses were conducted with the total sample (separately by grade) to compare single- versus two-parent households. There were very few differences between the two groups in the total and ethnic subgroup samples. One notable difference was that the path from parental involvement to time spent with friends was sometimes smaller in single-parent households than in two-parent households. We did not include this variable in the analyses reported here because findings were similar across two-parent and single-parent families, sample sizes became increasingly small when including the number of parents in the household, and the number of parents living at home is confounded by ethnicity. Furthermore, the number of parents in the household does not consider important extended family members who may be present outside the home, which may be of even greater importance for single-parent homes.
One disadvantage of such a large sample, however, is that very small differences between groups may be statistically significant and are then overemphasized in the results. The most straightforward remedy was to conduct the analyses with the sample size cut in half, which still allowed us to conduct the six-group analyses, yet examine meaningful differences between groups. Thus, within the LISREL program syntax we designated the sample size as half of the true sample number.
Some of the completely standardized common metric disturbance terms were greater than 1.0, which is not necessarily problematic (see Alwin, 1988; Jöreskog, 1999). In particular, for a standardized multi-group common metric standardized solution, the latent variables are rescaled such that the sum of the weighted average of the variances (by the group sample size) are equal to 1. The common metric disturbance term for each group is the product of the within-group standardized disturbance term and the common metric variance. Thus, even if all disturbance terms are less than 1 for each single group in the within standardized solution, there is no guarantee that the standardized common metric variances are less than 1.0.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (#032769) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (#DA01411). We thank Virginia Laetz for help with data analysis and Tanya Hart for editorial assistance.
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Pilgrim, C.C., Schulenberg, J.E., O’Malley, P.M. et al. Mediators and Moderators of Parental Involvement on Substance Use: A National Study of Adolescents. Prev Sci 7, 75–89 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-005-0019-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-005-0019-9