Longitudinal Associations Among Parent, Closest Friend, and Popular Peer Injunctive Norms and Adolescent Substance Use

• In Event: Peers and Risky Behaviors

Abstract

Substantial research has been dedicated towards understanding how adolescents’ parents, closest friends, and popular peers influence adolescent substance use, albeit in largely independent bodies of literature. Adolescents befriend peers whose substance use resembles their own and affiliation with substance using friends is associated with adolescents’ own increased engagement (Kandel, 1978; Giletta et al., 2012). Fewer studies, however, have examined how adolescents’ perceptions of popular peers’ behaviors or attitudes are associated with adolescents’ own substance use (Helms et al., 2014). While both putative socializing sources have been revealed as influential through communication of their substance use attitudes (i.e., injunctive norms), few studies have simultaneously examined the effects of closest friends and popular peers. Parents, like peers, can influence their adolescent’s substance use behavior; parental monitoring, knowledge of their adolescent’s whereabouts, and adolescent perceptions of parents’ attitudes towards substances are associated with adolescents’ own substance use (Martino et al., 2009).
While substantial research has examined the influence of adolescents’ perceived peer or parent injunctive norms, comparatively few studies have examined the influence of all three sources in the same set of analyses. Developmental research has revealed that adolescents spend increasingly more time with their peers as compared to parents as they age (Larson et al., 1996), and thus, such an examination would require a longitudinal design to capture the potentially evolving nature of parent and peer influence. These gaps in the literature led to the development of two study hypotheses. First, it was hypothesized that adolescents’ own attitudes would demonstrate increasing similarity with perceived closest friend and popular peer norms, and greater discrepancies with perceived parent norms over time. Second, it was hypothesized that perceived closest friend and popular peer substance use norms would be more strongly associated with adolescents’ own substance use over time, during a parallel decrease in the predictive power of perceived parent norms over time.
A school-based ethnically and racially diverse sample of 868 seventh and eighth grade adolescents reported their own substance use attitudes, perceptions of their parents’, closest friends’, and popular peers’ injunctive norms, and reports of alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco use annually across five timepoints. To evaluate the initial hypothesis that perceived parent substance use norms would be stricter, and perceived closest friend and popular peer norms would be more lenient than adolescents’ own attitudes, five MANOVA analyses were conducted (i.e., one per grade) within each substance examined. To examine how each of these perceived norms is prospectively associated with adolescents’ frequency of substance use, random-interception auto-regressive cross-lagged models were estimated.
Findings revealed adolescents’ own attitudes were equally distant from peer norms while growing more discrepant from parent norms throughout development. Findings also revealed that the predictive power of parent and popular peer norms waned over time for some substances, while the association among closest friend norms and substance use remained constant. These findings suggest that closest friend norms represent a stable intervention point for adolescents of all ages, whereas the influence of parents and popular peers may depend on age and context.

Authors

• Nathan Field, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author

• Mitchell J Prinstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill