Behavioral alternatives are among the determinants of drug use that have received attention in laboratory-based animal and human studies. The underlying notion is that availability of competing alternative reinforcers decreases drug-seeking behavior maintained by a drug reinforcer. This strategy is part of behavioral treatments that encourage patients to broaden their behavioral repertoire as a means of decreasing the reinforcing effects of drugs. To investigate this notion from a complementary perspective, we analyzed data from an epidemiologic sample of more than 1500 urban middle-school students, who had completed private interviews/questionnaires in Spring 1993 as part of a longitudinal field trial being conducted by the Johns Hopkins Prevention Research Center in collaboration with the Baltimore City Public Schools. The assessment included a questionnaire to assess current behavioral repertoire. Drawing upon a dichotomous variable factor analysis of the repertoire data, we constructed seven indicators to represent different behavioral domains and then used multiple logistic regression to estimate associations with illicit drug use, holding constant age and sex. Illicit drug use was associated independently with less involvement in religious activities and greater involvement in work and other adult-like roles. These results corroborate other evidence on the potential etiologic significance of behavioral repertoire in relation to the risk of illicit drug use. Since these results do not address issues of temporal sequencing or other limitations of cross-sectional data, the association will be reexamined in the continuing study of this epidemiologic sample. More specifically, it will be possible to determine the association of behavioral repertoires with initiation of drug use. In addition, a more complete analytic model may reveal interactions among the behavioral domains as well as the influence of other risk or protective factors.
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