Relative impact of sociocultural variables on adolescent drug and alcohol use

The potential relationship between sociocultural influence systems and drug and alcohol use suggested by Interactive theory was explored by investigating the relationship between 19 sociocultural variables and 6 items indicating behavioral intention to use drugs or alcohol. The strength of the suggested relationship was established by comparing the strength of the sociocultural variables to 5 variables for which a relationship to drug and alcohol use had been previously established. The variables were chosen from the Pennsylvania Department of Education's 1988 Educational Quality Assessment (EQA) of eleventh grade students in 231 schools in Pennsylvania. The variables representing sociocultural influence systems were redefined through a factor analysis technique. Three significant factors were retained in the analysis. The factors included (a) teachers' perceptions of, and satisfaction with, various aspects of the school environment; (b) prosperity of the school; and (c) students' perceptions of the quality of discipline in their schools. A canonical correlation technique was utilized to investigate the relationship of the factors arrived at through the analysis, the remaining independent variables, and the five previously investigated variables to the variables measuring willingness to use drugs and alcohol. The canonical variables resulting from the analysis supported a significant relationship between the independent sociocultural variables of Students Perceptions of What Teachers Expect of Them Academically, Percentage of White Students, and the Prosper factor and the six dependent variables measuring intention to use drugs and alcohol. The relationship indicated that the more prosperous the school and the greater the students' perceptions of what teachers expect of them academically, the lower the reported intention to smoke or take pills and the higher the percentage of white students the higher reported intention to drink beer and liquor. The strongest relationship to the dependent variables in the canonical correlation was to the non-sociocultural variable Social Responsibility. However, several sociocultural variables including the Prosper factor and Students Perceptions of What Teachers Expect of Them Academically showed a stronger relationship than a number of non-condition variables.