Elsevier

Journal of Adolescent Health

Volume 40, Issue 4, April 2007, Pages 358.e9-358.e17
Journal of Adolescent Health

Original article
Truancy’s Effect on the Onset of Drug Use among Urban Adolescents Placed at Risk

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2006.11.138Get rights and content

Abstract

Purpose

To examine the relationship between truancy and the onset of drug use.

Methods

Discrete time survival analysis was used to assess the effect of truancy on initiation of drug use after adjusting for several potential confounders from age 11 to 15 years, using data from the Denver Youth Survey, a longitudinal sample of youth who grew up in socially disorganized neighborhoods of Denver, CO.

Results

In this population, truancy was a significant predictor of initiation of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use. The robust effect of truancy persisted after controlling for potential confounders, including school performance, school isolation, association with delinquent peers, personal delinquent values, parental monitoring, and family attachment.

Conclusions

Although this study cannot point to a causal relationship, we argue that the effect may be at least in part due to the unsupervised, unmonitored time with peers that truancy affords a young person. Truancy prevention is a field of research that needs much more attention. Keeping youth in school every day is likely to have many beneficial effects, and effective truancy prevention efforts may also help to prevent or delay the onset of drug use among adolescents.

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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