Dc. Gottfredson et Cs. Koper, RACE AND SEX-DIFFERENCES IN THE PREDICTION OF DRUG-USE, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 64(2), 1996, pp. 305-313
Efforts to prevent adolescent substance abuse often direct prevention
efforts at known correlates of substance use. The applicability to min
ority populations of risk factors uncovered for the general population
has been questioned, and the development of different programs target
ing the risk factors most salient for different groups has been recomm
ended. Such differentiated programming requires a more precise underst
anding of ethnic differences in the predictors of substance use than i
s now available. This article assesses these differences using data fr
om 981 Black and White male and female adolescents and latent variable
structural equations techniques. No group differences were observed i
n the prediction of past year variety of drug use for 9 of the 12 risk
factors examined. The predictive validity was higher for Whites than
for Blacks for 3 risk factors. The prediction of frequency of use was
weaker for Black women than for other groups. The low predictive valid
ity observed for Black women is most likely due to the extremely low l
evel of use among this group. The study concludes that the measures of
risk factors predict substance use for all groups examined but that e
xtremely rare behaviors are not well predicted.