School's in! Predicting teen cannabis use by conventionality, cultural disposition and social context (2015)

Aims: We aimed to study a latent social structure behind the variables associated with teenagers' cannabis use at the individual level and, in a social context, formed by school class.
Methods: The data used come from the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD), conducted in Finland in 2011 (N = 3744, response rate 89.6%). Methods used were Latent Class Analysis (LCA) and Multilevel Logistic Regression. The differences observed between pupil groups were interpreted through the concepts of social norms (conventionality of behaviour) and cultural dispositions.
Findings: Four different latent classes of pupils were found: the Conventionalists, the Alco-rebels, the Sub-cultural conventionalists and the Sub-cultural rebels. Although Sub-cultural conventionalists were aware of the cannabis culture, only a small proportion of them had ever tried cannabis. The risk for cannabis use was pronounced in all pupil groups compared to Conventionalists, the risk being the highest among Sub-cultural rebels. There was statistically significant variation in the cannabis use between schools, when the individual-level variables were taken into account.
Conclusions: The findings stress the cultural and normative heterogeneity of school children and the importance of the school environment. The cultural competence of Sub-cultural conventionalists could be utilized in the preventive work.