RACE AND SEX-DIFFERENCES IN THE PREDICTION OF DRUG-USE

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.