Peter Freedman-Doan

The education-drug use connection: How successes and failures in school relate to adolescent smoking, drinking, drug use, and delinquency.

Contents: Preface. Introduction and Overview. Literature Review: Conceptual and Empirical Overview of Issues. Survey Methods and Analysis Strategies. Educational Success and Failure: Causes and Correlates. Delinquency and Other Problem Behaviors Linked With Educational Success and Failure. How Educational Success and Failure Are Linked With Smoking in Adolescence and Young Adulthood. How Marijuana Use is Linked With Educational Success and Failure. How Cocaine Use is Linked With Educational Success and Failure. How Alcohol Use is Linked With Educational Success and Failure. Summary, Conclusions, and Implications. Appendix.

Who Chooses Military Service? Correlates of Propensity and Enlistment in the U.S. Armed Forces

This article examines factors correlated with plans for military service (military propensity) and actual enlistment. It reports bivariate and multivariate regression analyses, conducted separately for men and women, using survey data from nationwide samples totaling more than 100,000 U.S. high school seniors (classes of 1984–1991), and follow-up data from a subsample of more than 15,000 of the high school seniors obtained 1 or 2 years after graduation. Correlations between propensity and actual enlistment are high among women (η = .38) and very high among men (η = .57). Enlistment rates are lower among individuals with college-educated parents, high grades, and college plans; rates are higher among men, African Americans, Hispanics, and those who view military work roles as attractive. These relations are interpreted primarily as indirect effects on enlistment via propensity.

Adolescent Self-Esteem: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age.

Large-scale representative surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students in the United States show high self-esteem scores for all groups. African-American students score highest, Whites score slightly higher than Hispanics, and Asian Americans score lowest. Males score slightly higher than females. Multivariate controls for grades and college plans actually heighten these race/ethnic/gender differences. A truncated scoring method, designed to counter race/ethnic differences in extreme response style, reduced but did not eliminate the subgroup differences. Age differences in self-esteem are modest, with 12th graders reporting the highest scores. The findings are highly consistent across 18 annual surveys from 1991 through 2008, and self-esteem scores show little overall change during that period.

Twelfth-Grade Student Work Intensity Linked to Later Educational Attainment and Substance Use: New Longitudinal Evidence

Long hours of paid employment during high school have been linked to a variety of problem behaviors, but questions remain about whether and to what extent work intensity makes any causal contribution. This study addresses those questions by focusing on how 12th-grade work intensity is associated with substance use and educational attainment in the years following high school. It uses 2 nationally representative longitudinal data sets from the Monitoring the Future project, spanning a total of 3 decades. One data set tracks 8th graders for 8 years (modal ages 14-22) and provides extensive controls for possible prior causes; the second, larger data set tracks 12th graders for up to 12 years (to modal ages 29-30) and permits assessment of possible short-term and longer term consequences. Findings based on propensity score matching and multivariate regression analyses are highly consistent across the 2 sets of data. All findings show that more fundamental prior problems, including low academic performance and aspirations, make substantial contributions to substance use and long-term academic attainment (selection effects), but the findings also suggest that high work intensity during high school has long-term costs in terms of college completion and perhaps cigarette use.

Propensity to Serve in the U.S. Military: Temporal Trends and Subgroup Differences

Data from the Monitoring the Future project, a study of high school seniors (and since 1991, eighth and tenth graders) are used to define six recruitment periods in Americas all-volunteer military force, characterized by variations in entry-level pay, recruiting resources, educational benefit programs available, the recruiting environment, and recruit quality. Propensity to enlist is shown to drop between the eighth and the twelfth grades, and between 1991 and 1997 at each grade level studied. Propensity is also shown to have varied between 1976 and 1997 by gender, race, and college plans

Adolescent work intensity, school performance, and substance use: links vary by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

High school students who spend long hours in paid employment during the school year are at increased risk of lower grades and higher substance use, although questions remain about whether these linkages reflect causation or prior differences (selection effects). Questions also remain about whether such associations vary by socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. This study examines those questions using nationally representative data from two decades (1991-2010) of annual Monitoring the Future surveys involving about 600,000 students in 10th and 12th grades. White students are consistently more likely than minority students to hold paid employment during the school year. Among White and Asian American students, paid work intensity is negatively related to parental education and grade point averages (GPA) and is positively related to substance use. Also among Whites and Asian Americans, students with the most highly educated parents show the strongest negative relations between work intensity and GPA, whereas the links are weaker for those with less educated parents (i.e., lower SES levels). All of these relations are less evident for Hispanic students and still less evident for African American students. It thus appears that any costs possibly attributable to long hours of student work are most severe for those who are most advantaged--White or Asian American students with highly educated parents. Working long hours is linked with fewer disadvantages among Hispanic students and especially among African American students. Youth employment dropped in 2008-2010, but the relations described above have shown little change over two decades.

Sustained Waterpipe Tobacco Smoking and Trends Over Time

INTRODUCTION Use of waterpipe tobacco smoking (WTS) is now prevalent among U.S. adolescents. However, the more clinically relevant questions are whether users exhibit sustained patterns of use and whether use is increasing over time relative to other tobacco products. We aimed to examine factors associated with sustained WTS among U.S. adolescents and to compare prevalence trends between WTS and other tobacco products. METHODS The Monitoring the Future project began assessing WTS among 12th-grade students in 2010. In 2014, we conducted multivariable regression analyses to examine correlates of sustained WTS, which we defined as use at least six times in the past 12 months. We used trend analysis to compare use of WTS and other types of tobacco. RESULTS Of the 8,737 participants queried from 2010 to 2013, 18.8% (1,639) reported past-year WTS, whereas 7.2% (627) reported sustained use. Sustained WTS was inversely associated with female sex (versus male, OR=0.78, 95% CI=0.63, 0.96); African American race (versus Caucasian, OR=0.26, 95% CI=0.14, 0.48); and increased number of parents in the home (p<0.001). Sustained WTS was positively associated with increased school-level parental education (p=0.002); lower grades (p=0.005); truancy (p<0.001); lower religiosity (p<0.001); more evenings out per week (p<0.001); and dating (p=0.03). Visual inspection and non-overlapping CIs suggest that both past-year and sustained WTS are significantly increasing relative to cigarette use but not small cigar use. CONCLUSIONS Given the prevalence of sustained WTS and indications of its increase over time, it should be included in efforts related to tobacco surveillance and intervention.

Student Reports of Time Spent on Homework: Results from 20 Years Of National Samples

As part of the Monitoring the Future annual survey, researchers from the University of Michigan have been asking representative national samples of high school seniors about the number of hours they spend on homework each week. Here are the results for the past 20 years, from 1976 to 1995.