The Relationship between Future Orientation and Street Substance Use among Texas Alternative School Students

Abstract

Self-reported substance use data were collected from 963 alternative school students in grades 7-12 who were surveyed through the Safer Choices 2 study in Houston, Texas. Data were collected between October 2000 and March 2001. Logistic regression analyses indicated that lower levels of future orientation was significantly associated (OR = 0.88, 95% CI = 0.81-0.97) with thirty-day substance use after controlling for age and gender. In addition, lower levels of future orientation was found to have a significant association with students' lifetime substance use (OR = 0.93, 95% CI = 0.87-.99) after controlling for age, race, and gender. While the relationships tested in this study are exploratory, they provide evidence for an important connection between future orientation and substance use among adolescents attending alternative schools.

Immediate Survival Focus: Synthesizing Life History Theory and Dual Process Models to Explain Substance Use

“…The benefits of consuming substances seem to be rather short-term (e.g., positive affect), while costs to health and other aspects of human functioning are accrued over time and as frequency and severity of consumption increase (CASA, 2005;McCusker, 2006;ONDCP, 2004). Further, there is substantial evidence indicating that those characterized by high levels of substance use have short-term time horizons, or time perspectives (Adams, 2009;Peters, Jr. et al, 2005;Petry, Bickel, and Arnett, 1998;Robbins and Bryan, 2004;Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999). As substances seem to provide the experience of short-term acquisition and consumption of resources (e.g., via positive affect, expectancies, etc.…”

Postmodernity and Mental Health

“…118 Likewise, in another study, lower future orientation among adolescents was associated with higher substance abuse. 119 Another strand of research that may be relevant here is the large corpus of empirical and theoretical material Postmodernity and Mental Health 361 examining elevated rates of youth suicide among aboriginal people in Canada. That research suggests that aboriginal individuals and communities with a strong sense of cultural continuity spanning past, present, and future have low or absent rates of suicide.…”

Future Orientation of Adolescents in Foster Care: Relationship to Trauma, Mental Health, and HIV Risk Behaviors

“…Although a stronger future orientation is known to be associated with fewer risky behaviors in other adolescent populations (e.g., Jurich & Hughes, 1991;Peters et al, 2005;Robbins & Bryan, 2004;Somers & Gizzi, 2001;Wills et al, 2001), this study represents the first effort to explore the relationship between future orientation and risky sexual behaviors in maltreated youth. Because foster care adolescents are a high-risk group for contracting HIV (Auslander et al, 2002;D'Angelo et al, 1994), there is a sense of urgency to identify all potentially modifiable protective factors such as future orientation that will facilitate the development of prevention programs.…”

“…Because future orientation is associated with cognitions, mental health, and behaviors in the general adolescent population (Herrenkohl et al, 2005;Jurich & Hughes, 1991;Peters et al, 2005;Robbins & Bryan, 2004;Somers & Gizzi, 2001;Wills et al, 2001), the present study examined how future orientation functions in foster care adolescents. The idea that future orientation may prove to be a salient factor in foster care adolescents' mental health and behavior is described by Holman and Silver (1998), who demonstrated that individuals who experience trauma often develop a past-focused temporal orientation.…”