Ethnic Differences in Adolescent Perceptions of and Attitudes Toward Substance Use

Abstract

The current study identified ethnic differences in beliefs about substance use and assessed their impact on frequency of use of various substances. Participants were 1,398 Caucasian and African-American rural secondary school students. Only tobacco or cigarettes had significant differences for both cognitive and frequency of use variables. Results revealed that Caucasian students reported higher past 12-month tobacco use compared to African-American students. Congruently, African-American students reported perceiving significantly greater wrongness in tobacco use. In contrast, Caucasian students had a significantly greater perception of harm of tobacco use compared to African-American students. When these cognitive variables were entered as mediators of the ethnicity–cigarette use relationship, only the attitude of wrongness variable served as a significant partial mediator. These data highlight the importance of addressing attitudes as part of substance use prevention.