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Individual and Contextual Effects of School Adjustment on Adolescent Alcohol Use

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An Erratum to this article was published on 19 August 2010

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of a student’s own school adjustment as well as the contextual level of school adjustment (the normative level of school adjustment among students in a school) on students’ self-reported use of alcohol. Using a dataset of 43,465 male and female 8th grade students from 349 schools across the contiguous United States who participated in a national study of substance use in rural communities between 1996 and 2000, multilevel latent covariate models were utilized to disentangle the individual-level and contextual effects of three school adjustment variables (i.e., school bonding, behavior at school, and friend’s school bonding) on alcohol use. All three school adjustment factors were significant predictors of alcohol use both within and between schools. Furthermore, this study demonstrated a strong contextual effect: Students who attended schools where the overall level of school adjustment was higher reported lower levels of alcohol use even after taking their own school adjustment into account. The results demonstrate the importance of both a student’s own level of school adjustment and the normative level of school adjustment among students in the school on an adolescent’s use of alcohol. Differences in school adjustment across schools were quite strongly related to an adolescent’s own alcohol use, indicating that school adjustment is an important aspect of school climate. Initiatives aimed at improving school climate may have beneficial effects on students’ alcohol use.

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Notes

  1. The CDAS is a variation of the American Drug & Alcohol Survey (Oetting et al. 1984) and the Prevention Planning Survey (Oetting et al. 1996), which are the copyrighted property of Rocky Mountain Behavioral Science Institute, Inc. (“RMBSI”), a corporation located in Fort Collins, Colorado. This research project was granted permission to use and modify the survey through a special agreement between RMBSI and the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research. Others wishing to use this survey or any other copyrighted instruments of RMBSI should contact RMBSI at 1-800-447-6354 or http://www.rmbsi.com.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the staff of the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research, Colorado State University, and the staff and students of the school districts under study, for making this research possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1876, USA

    Kimberly L. Henry, Lindsey C. Harkabus & Laurie A. Chapin

  2. Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1876, USA

    Linda R. Stanley & Ruth W. Edwards

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  1. Kimberly L. Henry
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  2. Linda R. Stanley
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  4. Lindsey C. Harkabus
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kimberly L. Henry.

Additional information

FUNDING: This research was supported by grants K01 DA017810-01A1 (awarded to Kimberly L. Henry) and R01 DA98349 (awarded to Ruth W. Edwards) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11121-010-0185-2.

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Henry, K.L., Stanley, L.R., Edwards, R.W. et al. Individual and Contextual Effects of School Adjustment on Adolescent Alcohol Use. Prev Sci 10, 236–247 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-009-0124-2

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