Adolescent Substance Use and Individual Beliefs That Drug Use Is Wrong: A Statewide Epidemiological Study

Objective: Informed by cognitive dissonance theory, the current study investigated the ability of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong to predict likelihood of past year substance use abstinence as well as frequency of use at grades 8, 10, and 12. Method: Study analyses were executed from a statewide epidemiological survey of more than 125,000 youth using multi-group Zero-Inflated Poisson regression modeling. Results: Personal belief that drug use is wrong demonstrated the largest magnitude of effect at each grade among the individual, family, and school-based factors under examination; this finding emerged with respect to predicting past year substance use abstinence as well as rates of substance use among individuals reporting past year use. Although differences across grades were evident for the magnitude of effect within various risk and protective factors, the rank ordering in magnitude of effect between factors was consistent across grades 8, 10, and 12. Conclusion: Current results underscore the salience of youths’ belief that drug use is wrong in explaining likelihood of past year substance use at multiple time points during adolescence. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10826084.2022.2034877.