Abstract
The present study examined the joint development of substance use and externalizing problems in early and middle adolescence. First, it was tested whether the relevant groups found in previous studies i.e., those with an early onset, a late onset, and no onset or low levels of risk behavior could be identified, while using a developmental model of a single, underlying construct of risk behavior. Second, departing from Moffitt’s taxonomy of antisocial behavior, it was tested if early, but not late, onset risk behavior is predicted by a problematic risk profile in childhood. Data were used from TRAILS, a population based cohort study, starting at age 11 with two follow-ups at mean ages of 13.6 and 16.3 years. Latent transition analyses demonstrated that, both in early and middle adolescence, a single underlying construct of risk behavior, consisting of two classes (labeled as low and high risk behavior), adequately represented the data. Respondents could be clearly classified into four possible transition patterns from early to middle adolescence, with a transition from high to low being almost non-existent (2.5 %), low to low (39.4 %) and low to high (41.8 %) being the most prevalent, and high to high (16.2 %) substantial. As hypothesized, only the high-high group was characterized by a clear adverse predictor profile in late childhood, while the low-high group was not. This study demonstrates that the development of substance use is correlated with externalizing problems and underscores the theory that etiologies of early and later onset risk behavior are different.
Highlights
Experimenting with substance use and other types of risk behavior are common in adolescence (Hibell et al 2009)
This study demonstrates that the development of substance use is correlated with externalizing problems and underscores the theory that etiologies of early and later onset risk behavior are different
At baseline (T1), 10.6 % were of non-Western origin; approximately a fifth (21.3 %) of the sample had parents who were divorced, and 25 % were living in a low socio-economic status family
Summary
Experimenting with substance use and other types of risk behavior are common in adolescence (Hibell et al 2009). Longitudinal studies have demonstrated that there are marked individual differences in the developmental patterns of these behaviors. Clear differences between the predictor profiles confirmed that, compared to the abstainers and late onset groups, the early onset substance use group appeared to be at much higher risk for adverse childhood predictors (revealing a problematic profile), including lower levels of parental knowledge about adolescents’ activities and self-esteem and higher levels of novelty seeking and conduct disorder (Flory et al 2004; Wanner et al 2006)
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