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Salience of Dual Systems Constructs for Predicting Stimulant/Amphetamine Use Across Adolescence and Early Adulthood: a Mixed Effects Modeling Approach

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Abstract

Stimulant/amphetamine use presents a major public health problem. There is a dearth of research which has studied this behavior from a dual systems model perspective. This study examined the relevance of sensation-seeking and impulse control for predicting stimulant/amphetamine use and tested whether these relationships varied as a function of time. The Pathways to Desistance data were used in analyses, comprising the responses of 1,354 justice-involved youth across 84 months with 11 data points each. Mixed effects modeling was used to examine these relationships. Results indicated that greater sensation-seeking was associated with greater odds of stimulant/amphetamine use. This relationship varied as a linear function of time, with the salience of sensation-seeking for predicting stimulant/amphetamine use declining as participants got older. However, this interaction only reached marginal significance at the p < .09 level. Interventions focused on sensation-seeking may help reduce stimulant/amphetamine use, but effects may be greater for adolescents relative to young adults.

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Notes

  1. While other drugs like cocaine also can be understood as stimulants, the Pathways to Desistance study measured these drugs separately. As such, the choice was made to focus solely on amphetamines and stimulants other than powder cocaine and crack cocaine in this study.

  2. The individual items used to assess sensation-seeking were I like to be where exciting things happen; I get bored quickly when there is too little change; I like to do things just for the thrill of it; I get bored quickly be doing the same thing over and over; I like to do exciting and dangerous things, even if it is forbidden or illegal.

  3. Sensitivity analyses were conducted because of the moderate correlation between sensation-seeking and impulse control, drawing concerns about collinearity washing out effects. As such, separate models were estimated that omitted one or the other construct in order to examine direct and interaction effects separately for each dual systems construct. Model 1 results were analogous to those of the main analyses, as both constructs exerted significant direct effects in each separate model. Model 2 effects indicated that omitting impulse control resulted in both the direct effect of sensation-seeking and the interaction effect being statistically significant. The interaction model that excluded sensation-seeking indicated that the direct effect of impulse control was significant in the predicted manner, but the interaction effect remained non-significant. This provides some evidence that collinearity may have resulted in a washing out of the direct effect of impulse control and the interaction between sensation-seeking and age in model 2.

  4. It should be noted that sample size was relatively small for ages at the extreme ends of the age gradient, relative to other ages (e.g., age 14 N = 43; age 18 N = 2235; age 26 N = 2). Participants aged 14 and 26 were excluded from Fig. 1 because there were not enough participants who were this age in the data that were able to be modeled because of the lagged effects of sensation-seeking.

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  1. School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Thomas Wojciechowski

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Wojciechowski, T. Salience of Dual Systems Constructs for Predicting Stimulant/Amphetamine Use Across Adolescence and Early Adulthood: a Mixed Effects Modeling Approach. J Dev Life Course Criminology 7, 676–694 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-021-00181-9

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