Longitudinal Relationship Between Future Orientation, Substance Use and Delinquency Among African American and Latino Young Men

Purpose: Positive future perspective and aligning of goals focused on later life education, employment, or personal attainments are important developmental competencies of adolescence. However, not all adolescents are afforded the same opportunity to develop realistic positive expectations of the future. African American and Latino youth experience convergent and cumulative risks that disproportionately relegate them to poverty and significantly limit their life possibilities. Minority youth are more likely to believe they will not live to old age compared to White, middle-income youth. Significant differences in the expectation to live a full, healthy, productive life among youth who experience multiple forms of disadvantage has implications for how youth think about health risks and make decisions in the present. Previous research has built a body of evidence demonstrating that negative future orientation is associated with increased engagement in risk behavior, whereas positive future orientation can serve as a buffer for high risk youth. Yet few studies have examined these associations longitudinally or examined future orientation as a multidimensional construct. The current work examines the reciprocal developmental relationships between future orientation and risk behavior among African American and Latino young men growing up in the context of low-income urban neighborhoods.

Method: We examined the reciprocal relationships among positive future expectations, expected threats to future safety, depression, and individual substance use and delinquency using four waves of data (N= 248-338) from African American and Latino adolescent male participants in the Chicago Youth Development Study (CYDS). CYDS is a longitudinal prospective cohort study of risk of school failure, antisocial behavior and violence among inner-city African American (53.7%) and Latino (42.7%) young men. 62% of participants live in single-parent homes, 47.6% of the families report income below $10,000/year, and 73.5% below $20,000. Participants were recruited from 17 Chicago public schools. Individual positive future expectations and expected threats to safety were assessed at each wave and modeled as latent constructs. Individual substance use and delinquency were assessed at each wave and represented as ordinal variables ranging from low to high. Categorical autoregressive cross-lagged structural models were used to examine the hypothesized reciprocal relationships between both aspects of future expectations and risk behavior across adolescence.

Results: Analyses show future expectations has important significant effects on youth substance use and involvement in delinquency, both of which in turn decrease positive expectations and increase expectation of threats to future safety across adolescence. Similarly, low positive expectations for the future continued to predict increased substance use and involvement in delinquency. Expected threats to safety was significantly correlated with delinquency within time. These effects are observed across adolescence after accounting for depression over time.

Conclusions: Findings support the reciprocal effects hypothesis of a negative reinforcing cycle in the relationships between future expectations and both substance use and involvement in delinquent behavior across adolescence. The enduring nature of these relationships underscores the importance of future expectation as a potential change mechanism for intervention and prevention efforts to promote healthy development–vulnerable racial and ethnic minority adolescent males may especially benefit from such intervention.