Original articleTruancy’s Effect on the Onset of Drug Use among Urban Adolescents Placed at Risk
Section snippets
Theoretical framework for the relationship between truancy and the onset of drug use
The role of the school in an adolescent’s life has been incorporated into most theories that describe adolescent problem behavior. For example, Catalano and Hawkins’ [12] social development model stresses the importance of school bonding as a critical component of pro-social development. Students who are not well bonded to school are more likely to follow an antisocial path through adolescence. As students become disengaged from school, one potential manifestation of this disengagement may be
Potential confounding variables of the relationship between truancy and initiation of drug use
It is important to note that an observed relationship between truancy and onset of drug use could be spurious if some third variable(s) cause both truancy and onset of drug use. We identified four sets of potential confounding variables that may account for both truancy and initiation of drug use: these include school-related variables, peer-related variables, individual attitudes/beliefs, and family-related variables; each of these are detailed below.
First, one might hypothesize that poor
Sample
The Denver Youth Survey (DYS) is based on a probability sample of households in high-risk neighborhoods of Denver, CO. These neighborhoods were selected on the basis of their social ecology in terms of population and housing characteristics. Only socially disorganized neighborhoods with high official crime rates (top one third) were included. The participants in the DYS include 1528 children and youth who lived in one of the randomly selected households and were 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 years of
Results
We started by fitting an unconditional survival model for each drug, that is, a survival model that included only the time indicators (one time indicator for each age). The hazard function for first use of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use estimated from these models is presented in Figure 1. Each function describes the probability that a student would initiate use of a particular drug between the age j-1 and age j assessment, given that he or she had never used the drug coincident with or
Discussion
In this paper, we have demonstrated the effect of truancy on initiation of drug use among urban adolescents who grew up in socially disorganized neighborhoods of Denver, CO. Consistent with our hypothesis, truancy significantly increased the odds of initiation of drug use after adjusting for gender, race, and potential confounders. Our own theoretical orientation for the best explanation of the observed relationship follows the thinking of Osgood and colleagues [16], [17] and Stoolmiller [18].
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by grant K01 DA017810-01A1 (PI: Kimberly L. Henry) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and grant 96-MU-FX-0017 (PI: David Huizinga) from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, US Department of Justice. Points of view or opinions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent official positions or policies of the National Institute of Drug Abuse or the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
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