What is it about?
This paper explores a way to estimate an adolescent's future risk of drinking alcohol, getting drunk, smoking cigarettes and using cannabis (marijuana). Substance use risk increases as adolescents grow older. This paper shows that attitudes figure prominently as predictors of future risk.
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Why is it important?
Substance use increases generally during adolescence. However, prior to completing this research, the risk an individual adolescent might face had never been an outcome that could be estimated. I believe this is the first paper to attempt to predict the future risk of individual adolescents. It turns out that an adolescent's early attitudes can be used to estimate future risk!
Perspectives
There have been many papers that have published findings about what variables correlate with or predict substance use. I wondered if it wouldn't be possible to extend these types of findings one more step to understand what this would mean for an individual teen. This paper should move the field forward and provides a practical way to give care providers a useful tool for estimating risk. One finding that emerged that I think of as very interesting is understanding how risk changes for teens with initially different levels of risk. Knowing that trajectories differ depending on initial risk should be very important for the design of preventive interventions.
Dr. William B. Hansen
Prevention Strategies
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Using attitudes, age and gender to estimate an adolescent’s substance use risk, Journal of Children s Services, September 2016, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/jcs-06-2015-0020.
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