Elsevier

Addictive Behaviors

Volume 39, Issue 4, April 2014, Pages 818-823
Addictive Behaviors

Time horizons and substance use among African American youths living in disadvantaged urban areas

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2013.12.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Time horizons and drug use among disadvantaged African American urban youths were examined.

  • Substance use was related to greater present pleasure/reward-seeking orientation.

  • Substance use was related to lower tendency to plan and achieve future goals.

  • Delay discounting was not significantly related to substance use.

  • Results support interventions aimed at lengthening time perspectives.

Abstract

Transitioning from adolescence to full-fledged adulthood is often challenging, and young people who live in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods face additional obstacles and experience disproportionately higher negative outcomes, including substance abuse and related risk behaviors. This study investigated whether substance use among African Americans ages 15 to 25 (M = 18.86 years) living in such areas was related to present-dominated time perspectives and higher delay discounting. Participants (N = 344, 110 males, 234 females) living in Deep South disadvantaged urban neighborhoods were recruited using Respondent Driven Sampling, an improved peer-referral sampling method suitable for accessing this hard-to-reach target group. Structured field interviews assessed alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use and risk/protective factors, including time perspectives (Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory [ZTPI]) and behavioral impulsivity (delay discounting task). As predicted, substance use was positively related to a greater ZTPI orientation toward present pleasure and a lower tendency to plan and achieve future goals. Although the sample as a whole showed high discounting of delayed rewards, discount rates did not predict substance use. The findings suggest that interventions to lengthen time perspectives and promote enriched views of future possible selves may prevent and reduce substance use among disadvantaged youths. Discontinuities among the discounting and time perspective variables in relation to substance use merit further investigation.

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.

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    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.

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