Socioeconomic Status, Parental Education, School Connectedness and Individual Socio-Cultural Resources in Vulnerability for Drug Use among Students

Gilberto Gerra, Elisa Benedetti, Giuliano Resce (), Roberta Potente, Arianna Cutilli and Sabrina Molinaro
Additional contact information
Gilberto Gerra: Drug Prevention and Health Branch, Division for Operations, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, P.O. Box 500, 1400 Vienna, Austria
Elisa Benedetti: Epidemiology and Health Research Lab, Institute of Clinical Physiology—IFC, National Research Council of Italy—CNR, Via G. Moruzzi, 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy
Roberta Potente: Epidemiology and Health Research Lab, Institute of Clinical Physiology—IFC, National Research Council of Italy—CNR, Via G. Moruzzi, 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy
Arianna Cutilli: Epidemiology and Health Research Lab, Institute of Clinical Physiology—IFC, National Research Council of Italy—CNR, Via G. Moruzzi, 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy
Sabrina Molinaro: Epidemiology and Health Research Lab, Institute of Clinical Physiology—IFC, National Research Council of Italy—CNR, Via G. Moruzzi, 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 4, 1-17

Abstract: Background and Aims: Families who live in a disadvantaged socioeconomic situation frequently face substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, inadequate schools and more stress in their daily lives than more affluent families, with a host of psychological and developmental consequences that can hinder their children’s development in many ways. However, the measurement of socioeconomic status among youth and its link with different forms of illicit substance use is challenging and still unclear. This paper extends existing research on the relationship between socioeconomic status and illicit drug use among adolescents by focusing on three different patterns of use (experimental, episodic and frequent) and making use of two indicators to improve the measurement of individual socioeconomic characteristics in a big sample of European students. Methods: Data were drawn from the European school Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs (ESPAD), which, since 1995, collects comparable data among 15-to-16-year-old students to monitor trends in drug use and other risk behaviors across Europe. The sample comes from 28 countries that participated in the 2015 data collection. The consumption of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are considered, and the related patterns are identified based on the frequency of use. Family characteristics at student level are defined through two dimensions: parental educational level and perceived socioeconomic status. Multivariate multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression was performed in order to measure the association between individual characteristics and vulnerability for drug use. Results: Some patterns of use, episodic and frequent in particular, were found strongly associated with a lower socioeconomic status and lower parental education. Conclusions: Our results suggest that drug policies should be combined with actions aimed at removing barriers to social inclusion that are attributable to the socioeconomic background of adolescents.

Keywords: socioeconomic inequalities; parental education; drug use; cannabis; cocaine; heroine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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