Students often drink alcohol at their highest levels in college. It is suggested that students with the most severe drinking problems begin drinking by or in high school, but studies on high school drinking tend to focus on students who have academic problems and are not college-bound. The purpose of this study was to examine high school drinking…

Drawing on data gathered in the 2009 Monitoring the Future study of American youth, and controlling for race and noncompetitive exercise frequency, this research examined the explanatory effects of competitive sports participation on alcohol consumption and marijuana use as well as the nonmedical use of prescription pain relievers among American…

Truant youths frequently experience family problems, emotional/psychological issues, substance misuse, and delinquency. They are likely engaging in alcohol use and sexual risk behavior at a higher rate than the general youth population. Early intervention services would benefit them, their families, and society. We present interim findings from an…

A total of 366 American Indian students in grades 7 through 12 completed the PRIDE questionnaire. Recent alcohol use was reported by 31.9% of students, whereas 26.7% reported frequent episodic heavy drinking. One in three students felt it was harmful/very harmful to use alcohol and less than half felt alcohol was easy/very easy to obtain. A series…

This study utilized data drawn from a study of 980 adolescents living in Tijuana, Mexico, in February 2009 to examine whether parental monitoring had a moderating impact on the influence of peer pro-drug norms on lifetime and past-30-day alcohol and cigarette use among a group of adolescents living along the United States-Mexico border. The…

Purpose: Prevalence estimates for drug use health risk behaviors among high school students are widely available, but relatively few studies describe how and to what extent these risk behaviors occur together. Furthermore, little research has examined whether the co-occurrence of health risk behaviors varies by key demographic characteristics such…

A total of 726 youths presenting a severe addiction were evaluated at the time of their request for services in an addiction rehabilitation center. Results show that the more delinquent youths have a more severe profile of substance use, thus confirming the strong association between psychoactive substance (PAS) use severity and delinquency. Girls…

The present study examines several types of social anxiety that may be associated with the onset of alcohol use in middle school students, and whether the relationship differs by sex and grade. Students in the seventh and eighth grades (N = 2,621) completed the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents and a measure of lifetime drinking via schoolwide…

The impact of a parent's incarceration and adolescents' emotional health on their substance abuse and delinquency is described for a group of at-risk 10- to 14-year-old adolescents. Data were drawn from a two-wave longitudinal study from the federally funded Children at Risk program, ongoing in five states from 1993 to 1997. Results point to a…

Using data from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, this study examines whether several social exclusion and psychological factors affect adolescents' receipt of substance abuse treatment. Multinomial logistic regression techniques were used to analyze data. The study asked how the specified factors provide pathways to receipt of…

Using retrospective self-reporting, rates of illegal and legal performance-enhancing substance (PES) use in the past three months among more than 3,400 Italian high school adolescents were obtained and estimated. The study focused on the extent to which these sociodemographic characteristics and illegal PES use were associated with adolescents'…

Internalizing symptoms (withdrawn/depressed and anxious/depressed), measured by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), were examined as related to the development of externalizing problems, a pathway to risky behavior. A cross-section of children ages 6 to 15 was drawn from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's (NICHD) Study…

A range of research has recognized the benefits of optimism in a variety of health-related outcomes. Pessimism has received less attention but may be a distinct concept that is uniquely related to certain health behaviors, including drug use. The present study examined relationships between optimism and pessimism and alcohol use trajectories of…

A model of negative affect and alcohol use was replicated on a sample of African-American high school students. Participants (N = 5,086) were randomly selected from a previously collected data set and consisted of 2,253 males and 2,833 females residing in both rural and urban locations. Multivariate analysis of covariance and structural equation…

Background: High school students involved in athletics may face additional stressors and engage in more problematic behaviors, such as drinking, dieting, and gambling, than non-athletes, especially as they near the end of their high school experience. Studies have, in general, found mixed results as to whether sports serve a protective factor or…