An examination of the association between early initiation of substance use and interrelated multilevel risk and protective factors among adolescents

Abstract

One of the major goals of drug use prevention programs is to delay the age of onset of substance use. What is called early initiation, usually occurring in adolescents under the age of 15, is a salient predictor of Substance Use Disorders later in adulthood. The causes of early initiation are complex and multifaceted and this has led to the identification of a rich set of risk and protective factors that influence age of onset. Nonetheless, there is little knowledge about the interdependence of these factors in their impact on early initiation. This paper addresses this question by applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis to data on family, community and social risk and protective factors from over 1200 adolescents. We find that community and to a lesser extent social factors are the most clearly associated to early initiation and we compare our results to those obtained from linear regression analyses of the same data that do not incorporate interdependence and find opposite results. We discuss the differences between linear regressions and MCA to evaluate the interplay of risk and protective factors and the implications of our findings for health policy and the design of prevention interventions aimed at delaying age of onset.

El objetivo de este estudio fue diseñar y validar una escala psicométrica para medir las actitudes hacia la violencia de pareja. Para ello se realizó una revisión teórica, derivando a una tabla de especificaciones que guió la construcción de los reactivos, seguido de un proceso de evaluación por jueces, la depuración de los reactivos y ajuste de la escala para la posterior aplicación a 357 personas, para luego llevar a cabo el análisis factorial de los datos obtenidos, y un análisis de confiabilidad y consistencia interna. Como resultado se construyó un instrumento conformado por 30 reactivos, con altos índices de validez (> .6) y confiabilidad (.859) para medir actitudes hacia la violencia de pareja.