Family adversities and substance use: A longitudinal study among Korean adolescents

We examined the developmental mechanisms linking parental disengagement and parental harshness to alcohol/tobacco use in later adolescence, focusing on the roles of adolescents' own delinquency and their peers' delinquency. Data were drawn from five waves of the nationally representative Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey 2010 (KCYPS 2010). We analyzed data from 2323 adolescents spanning Waves 2–6 (49.5 % female; mean age = 13.90, SD = 0.34). Hypothesized models were evaluated using a longitudinal structural equation modeling (LSEM) framework. Results indicated multiple mediation processes of parental disengagement and parental harshness. That is, parental disengagement predicted adolescents' alcohol/tobacco use via their own delinquency and then peer delinquency, whereas parental harshness predicted alcohol/tobacco use via peer delinquency and then their own delinquency. The findings suggest that preventive intervention efforts for adolescent substance use may benefit from treatment sequence modification based on the types of family adversities to which adolescents are exposed.