Time horizons and substance use among African American youths living in disadvantaged urban areas☆
Introduction
The years spanning adolescence to young adulthood comprise a distinctive developmental period, often termed emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000, Arnett, 2007). Many youths in the United States finish secondary school and move on to higher education, employment, or both. They may leave the parental home, change residences frequently, and often reach legal adult age without adult responsibilities. While this period offers a time of life exploration before settling into adult roles, it also is the developmental stage when substance use and other risk behaviors are higher (Arnett, 2005, Johnston et al., 2012). For example, national survey data (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2011) showed higher rates of current use of tobacco (40.8%), illicit drug (21.5%), and alcohol (ages 18–20: 48.9%; 21–25: 70.0%) among 18 to 25 year olds compared to all other age groups.
While risk-taking is common during emerging adulthood, individual differences exist in the extent of substance use and other risky behaviors and in the resulting problem severity (Zimbardo et al., 1997, Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999). Converging research using different conceptual frameworks and methods suggests that individual differences in sensitivity to delayed outcomes, reflecting the time horizons over which behavior is organized, may be a predictive and potentially modifiable variable to reduce substance use and other risk-taking. Time horizons reflect the extent to which behavior is organized around present versus future goals and have been measured several ways, including psychological studies of time perspectives (Henson et al., 2006, Keough et al., 1999), behavioral economic experiments on intertemporal choice (e.g., delay discounting; Bickel & Marsch, 2001), and naturalistic studies guided by behavioral economics of monetary allocations to short- versus long-term activities (e.g., Tucker, Roth, Vignolo, & Westfall, 2009). All found that riskier patterns of individual behavior were associated with less sensitivity to longer-term contingencies relative to immediate rewards, which is an intertemporal choice style consistent with behavioral features defining real life impulsive behaviors.
Despite conceptual similarities, delay discounting and time perspective have infrequently been examined in the same study. The few studies that assessed both domains found significant, but small, correlations (rs ≤ 0.2) in the predicted direction (Teuscher & Mitchell, 2011). Participants who showed steeper discounting were less likely to consider future consequences, more interested in immediate rewards, had greater orientation toward present pleasure, endorsed weaker beliefs about the connection between present behaviors and future consequences, and displayed lower interest in planning and achieving future goals (e.g., Daugherty and Brase, 2010, Steinberg et al., 2009). Modest correlations among measures notwithstanding, both present-dominated time perspectives and greater delay discounting may be manifestations of impulsivity and lower self-control, which have been theorized to underlie a host of self-regulatory behaviors, including substance use.
Although relations between substance use and either delay discounting or time perspective are established, including among college students (e.g., MacKillop et al., 2007, Vuchinich and Simpson, 1998), neither construct has been well studied in emerging adults from disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. A few studies demonstrated that delay discounting was steeper among African Americans compared to other racial and ethnic groups (Dennhardt and Murphy, 2011, Steinberg et al., 2009) and living in impoverished environments contributed to restricted and pessimistic future orientation (Nurmi, 1991). African American youths living in such circumstances thus seem particularly vulnerable to foreshortened time horizons, an issue deserving study in order to guide targeted risk reduction interventions for this disadvantaged population segment.
This study investigated whether individual differences in delay discounting and time perspective were related to substance use among African American emerging adults living in low income urban neighborhoods. Based on prior research, we predicted that substance use would be associated with present-dominated time perspectives and steeper discounting, even if the sample as a whole generally showed diminished concern with future consequences due to age, race, and income (Green et al., 1996, Steinberg et al., 2009).
Section snippets
Participants and recruitment
Participants were recruited for the Community Influences Transitions of Youth (CITY) Health project investigating resilience, risk, and behavioral health of emerging adults in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Birmingham-Hoover, AL metropolitan area. Recruitment was conducted using Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS; Heckathorn, 1997), which is an improved peer-referral sampling method that statistically corrects for sampling biases typical in chain-referral methods such as snowball sampling (
Sample characteristics
Table 1 presents sample descriptive statistics. Although the sample included more females than males, key demographic characteristics (e.g., age, education, marital status, parent status) did not differ by gender (Tucker et al., under review). The majority reported that they were in school or had received a high school or higher education and were religious. About one-fifth had children. The sample mean discount rate, k, was 0.15 (SD = 0.26), resulting in a mean logk of − 3.27 (SD = 2.14).
Time horizons and substance use
Table 2
Discussion
Some support was found for the study hypotheses. Greater substance use was associated with greater orientation toward present pleasure (Present-Hedonistic), lower focus on planning and achieving future goals (Future), and negative attitudes toward the past (Past-Negative). These associations are consistent with prior research using the ZTPI, including with younger adults (e.g., Henson et al., 2006). Substance use also was higher among participants who were male, had lower grades, were not in
Role of funding sources
This research was supported in part by CDC cooperative agreement 5U48DP001915 awarded to the UAB Prevention Research Center (PI: Jalie A. Tucker, Ph.D., M.P.H.). The CDC played no role in study design or in collection, analysis, or interpretation of data.
Contributors
JeeWon Cheong, PhD, CITY Health project co-investigator and methodologist, contributed to design and conception of the manuscript, analyzed the data, interpreted the results, wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and made critical contributions to manuscript revisions.
Jalie A. Tucker, PhD, MPH, CITY Health principal investigator, was responsible for overall project direction and contributed to study conception, design, measurement development, and data analysis and interpretation. She wrote
Conflict of interest
All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest regarding this manuscript.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Scott Crawford for assistance with data preparation and Tabitha McMullin, Mesha Parker, Whitney Sparks, Kiwania Morris, Kristi Stringer, Katherine Haralson, Bailey Murphy, and David Evans for help with data collection.
References (47)
- et al.
Developmental trajectories of substance use from early adolescence to young adulthood: Gender and racial/ethnic differences
Journal of Adolescent Health
(2012) - et al.
Adult identity mentoring: Reducing sexual risk for African American seventh-graders
Journal of Adolescent Health
(2005) - et al.
Taking time to be healthy: Predicting health behaviors with delay discounting and time perspective
Personality and Individual Differences
(2010) Delay discounting is associated with substance use in college students
Addictive Behaviors
(2003)How do adolescents see their future?: A review of the development of future orientation and planning
Developmental Review
(1991)- et al.
A possible selves intervention to enhance school involvement
Journal of Adolescence
(2002) - et al.
Dimensions of impulsive behavior: Personality and behavioral measures
Personality and Individual Differences
(2006) - et al.
Present time perspective as a predictor of risky driving
Personality and Individual Differences
(1997) Emerging adulthood. A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties
The American Psychologist
(2000)The developmental context of substance use in emerging adulthood
Journal of Drug Issues
(2005)
Emerging adulthood: What is it and what is it good for?
Child Development Perspective, 1(2 SRC - GoogleScholar)
A formal assessment of resilience: The Baruth Protective Factors Inventory
Journal of Individual Psychology
Toward a behavioral economic understanding of drug dependence: Delay discounting processes
Addiction (Abingdon, England)
Remember the future: Working memory training decreases delay discounting among stimulant addicts
Biological Psychiatry
Constructing Time After Death: The transcendental-future time perspective
Time & Society
A multiprocess latent class analysis of the co-occurrence of substance use and sexual risk behavior among adolescents
Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs
Associations between depression, distress tolerance, delay discounting, and alcohol-related problems in European American and African American college students
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors
Temporal discounting in choice between delayed rewards: The role of age and income
Psychology of Aging
Barriers to breast cancer control for African-American women: The interdependence of culture and psychosocial issues
Cancer
Respondent-driven sampling: A new approach to the study of hidden populations
Social Problems
Respondent-driven sampling II. Deriving valid population estimates from chain-referral samples of hidden populations
Social Problems
Associations among health behaviors and time perspective in young adults: Model testing with boot-strapping replication
Journal of Behavioral Medicine
Monitoring the Future national results on adolescent drug use: Overview of key findings, 2011
Cited by (0)
- ☆
This research was supported in part by CDC cooperative agreement 5U48DP001915 awarded to the UAB Prevention Research Center. Portions of the research were presented at the Division 28/Division 50 Collaborative Perspectives on Addiction Conference, Atlanta, GA, May 2013.
- 1
Telephone: + 1 205 975 8030/Fax: + 1 205 934 9325.