Adolescent Substance Use in Germany and the United States

Abstract

Theories of substance use highlight the importance of the sociocultural environment in understanding and explaining the prevalence and patterns of adolescent substance use. The likelihood to engage in substance use is said to be influenced by key social, structural and economic forces associated with the adolescents' demographic and socioeconomic background. Even though the need for cross-cultural applications of existing theoretical frameworks is apparent, the relationships posited by existing theories have mostly been tested with US samples. In the current article, data from the 2003 waves of the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey and the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) are used to investigate and assess the relationships between theoretically grounded measures and adolescent substance use in Germany and the United States.