Socioeconomic Status, Parental Education, School Connectedness and Individual Socio-Cultural Resources in Vulnerability for Drug Use among Students

Abstract

Background and Aims: Families who live in a disadvantaged socioeconomic situation frequently face substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, inadequate schools and more stress in their daily lives than more affluent families, with a host of psychological and developmental consequences that can hinder their children’s development in many ways. However, the measurement of socioeconomic status among youth and its link with different forms of illicit substance use is challenging and still unclear. This paper extends existing research on the relationship between socioeconomic status and illicit drug use among adolescents by focusing on three different patterns of use (experimental, episodic and frequent) and making use of two indicators to improve the measurement of individual socioeconomic characteristics in a big sample of European students. Methods: Data were drawn from the European school Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs (ESPAD), which, since 1995, collects comparable data among 15-to-16-year-old students to monitor trends in drug use and other risk behaviors across Europe. The sample comes from 28 countries that participated in the 2015 data collection. The consumption of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are considered, and the related patterns are identified based on the frequency of use. Family characteristics at student level are defined through two dimensions: parental educational level and perceived socioeconomic status. Multivariate multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression was performed in order to measure the association between individual characteristics and vulnerability for drug use. Results: Some patterns of use, episodic and frequent in particular, were found strongly associated with a lower socioeconomic status and lower parental education. Conclusions: Our results suggest that drug policies should be combined with actions aimed at removing barriers to social inclusion that are attributable to the socioeconomic background of adolescents.

Subjective Family Socioeconomic Status and Adolescents’ Attention: Blacks’ Diminished Returns

“…High SES adolescents also have access to a wide range of educational and stimulating resources in their homes [ 26 ]. Finally, high SES adolescents are being raised in environments which are low in stress [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. All these factors have strong positive effects on adolescents’ development [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ].…”

Prevalence and Socio-Demographic, Academic, Health and Lifestyle Predictors of Illicit Drug/s Use among University Undergraduate Students in Finland

“…In addition to the nature of the illicit substance used, comparisons are further compounded by the type/manner of use e.g., illicit use vs. medical use [ 71 ], as well as the various definitions of frequency of use: e.g., experimental, episodic, frequent [ 80 ]; or regular, occasional, and never use [ 28 ]. A related point is the changes in the legal context of marijuana use and recreational marijuana legalization (RML) [ 74 ] in some countries/states, and whether marijuana would be included in IDU or otherwise, particularly that the prevalence of marijuana use increased more after legalization among college students in RML vs. non-RML states [ 81 , 82 ].…”

Family’s Subjective Economic Status and Children’s Matrix Reasoning: Blacks’ Diminished Returns

“…Both inside and outside of school, children from families with economic means have stimulating environments that can contribute to their cognitive development (Larson, Russ, Nelson, Olson, & Halfon, 2015). Finally, economic well-being buffers against stress, which is a risk factor for undesired cognitive outcomes in children (Gerra et al, 2020;Kelishadi et al, 2017;Rodriguez et al, 2019;Schibli, Wong, Hedayati, & D'Angiulli, 2017;Vargas et al, 2020). All these mechanisms have cumulative effects on children's cognitive development in families with economic resources (Bouthoorn et al, 2014;Christensen, Schieve, Devine, & Drews-Botsch, 2014;Karlsson, De Neve, & Subramanian, 2018;Madhushanthi, Wimalasekera, Goonewardena, Amarasekara, & Lenora, 2018;Poh et al, 2019).…”