Duration of Unemployment and Substance Use Disorder Symptoms Among Young Adults: Do Childhood Neighborhood Disadvantages Play a Role?

Background: Scholars have suggested that unemployment may lead to psychiatric problems including problematic substance use among young adults, but existing empirical evidence is inconclusive. Furthermore, little is known about the role of early neighborhood disadvantages in the link between unemployment and problematic substance use. 

Guided by the debate of social causation/social selection, the life course perspective, and the notions of general- and substance use specific risk factors, the present study examined four central research questions: 1) is unemployment during young adulthood associated with alcohol use disorder symptoms, nicotine dependence symptoms, and cannabis use disorder symptoms at age 39, even after taking into account childhood and adolescent involvement in substance use?; 2) do neighborhood disadvantages in childhood predict the disorder symptoms? If so, do general and substance-use specific neighborhood disadvantages in childhood differentially predict the disorder symptoms?; 3) do general and substance-use specific neighborhood disadvantages condition the impact of unemployment on the disorder symptoms?; and 4) are there gender differences in the association of primary predictors (i.e. duration of unemployment, general neighborhood disadvantages, and substance use-specific neighborhood disadvantages) with the adult disorder symptoms? 

Method: Data are from the Seattle Social Development Project (n=808). Alcohol use disorder symptoms, nicotine dependence symptoms, and cannabis use disorder symptoms were assessed at age 39 using the Diagnostic Interview Schedule. Participants’ unemployment history was prospectively measured using the life-course calendar, which was utilized to create the duration of unemployment from ages 21 to 33. Self-reported childhood general (e.g., crime, run down housing) and substance use-specific (e.g., drug selling, adult drug use) neighborhood disadvantages were assessed at ages 10-18, respectively. Covariates included baseline symptoms of psychopathology assessed with Teacher Report of the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist, baseline substance use, SES of family of origin, gender, and ethnicity. Considering the distributional properties of the outcome measures, a series of negative binominal models were estimated. 

Results: Duration of unemployment was associated with higher levels of alcohol use disorder and nicotine dependence symptoms, even after adjusting for childhood and adolescent involvement in substance use. Substance-use specific neighborhood disadvantages during childhood predicted nicotine dependence symptoms and cannabis use disorder symptoms, whereas neither measure of neighborhood disadvantages was related to alcohol use disorder symptoms. Findings also suggested that incident rates of nicotine dependence symptoms were disproportionately higher among females who experienced unemployment.   

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that unemployment is a potent risk factor for alcohol use disorder and nicotine dependence symptoms, indicating that social work efforts providing strategies to cope with unemployment, particularly for females who experience chronic unemployment, may be useful. Findings also suggest that substance-use specific neighborhood characteristics during childhood should be considered in efforts to effectively ameliorate adult substance use problems.