Posted on March 8, 2010

No parent wants their child to skip or completely discontinue attending school. After all, idle hands are the devil’s tools. Parents worry that truancy leads directly to delinquency, opening the doors to multiple kinds of negative influences.

What parents fear may be not just a generally observed trend, but a direct link between truancy and other negative behaviors. Scientists are looking more closely at the connection between a lack of positive influences from school, long days of idleness and how substance abuse is a risk when truancy is the norm.

Kimberly L. Henry and Terence P. Thornberry recently published a study that examined the relationship between truancy and a higher rate of substance abuse during adolescent years. They also wanted to explore the potential mechanisms of the relationship.

The researchers gathered information from the Rochester Youth Development Study. The study was a longitudinal sample of youth (a majority of the participants were minority youth) growth models with time-varying covariates. The study employed the models to assess the relationship between truancy and substance abuse.

Mediated growth models were also used to establish the potential mechanisms of the relationship. Five waves of data were analyzed from 971 youth participants and their primary caregivers. The five waves of data were collected every six months from 1988 to 1990.

The participants were aged between 14 and 16 years, and 27 percent of the participants were female.

The results of the study show that there was an increased rate of substance use among truant adolescents. Not only did truant students use more illegal substances than those in school, but rates of substance abuse escalated as rates of truancy increased among individual students.

The rate of substance abuse was also affected by what the truant adolescent did with the free hours created by not attending school. The effect of escalation of truancy on the escalation of substance use was mediated by escalation of unsupervised time spent with their peers.

The rate of increase of substance abuse associated with increased rates of truancy points to the importance of school influences on peer relationship selection and the impact of multiple free hours spent in risky, unsupervised situations.

This study’s results show that understanding the effects of truancy is very important when planning education, prevention and intervention efforts for adolescent substance abuse. Given multiple free hours to spend with peers in risky situations significantly increases the likelihood that an adolescent will choose to participate in substance use.