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01-06-2013 | Original Paper

Religiosity and Adolescents’ Involvement with Both Drugs and Sex

Authors: Florence Neymotin, Teresa M. Downing-Matibag

Published in: Journal of Religion and Health | Issue 2/2013

Abstract

Previous research has shown that religion reduces adolescents’ risk of substance use, while having little impact on sexual risk-taking. However, few studies have examined how religion might mitigate adolescents’ involvement with both drugs and sex. Using the Child Development Supplement (CDS) in combination with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we fill this gap by determining how adolescents’ involvement with both drugs and sex is related to religiosity. We find the statistically significant relationship between religiosity and adolescents’ involvement in both risk behaviors is accounted for by school attachment, but the relationship between religiosity and drugs is robust.

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For more information on this procedure see: http://www.psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Guide/.

The values that were employed for family size and family income respectively constitute an averaging of the previous and future values of these variables due to data availability by year. Family income in 2003 is also deflated to 2001 values using the national CPI in order to maintain comparability of income estimates between the 2 years. Therefore, the overall construction of family income for 2002 was: \( {\text{FamilyIncome}}_{2002} \equiv \frac{{{\text{FamilyIncome}}_{2001} + ({\text{FamilyIncome}}_{2003} )(1/1.039)}}{2}. \)

It was impossible to distinguish individuals who had no formal education from those who did not answer the education question. For this reason, observations with no education were dropped from the dataset. The choice of the household head’s education alone, rather than using both parent’s education, was also due to the particular construction of the dataset and questionnaire. The sample overrepresented single mothers and for this reason there was sometimes only one parent present to use for parental educational background. The present structure follows that employed in other studies using CDS data.

We initially focused our analysis to a greater extent on the effects of volunteering as well as religiosity on risk behaviors due to the focus both of these characteristics share on social norms and superego concerns. We found essentially no statistically significant impacts of volunteering on risk behaviors at the conventional level and so decided to restrict our attention primarily to religiosity. However, we have continued to employ volunteering as a control characteristic to show that leaving it out does not bias our results.

Some results are suppressed for brevity and because it was not logical to include regressions for early age sex for some specifications of the sample. General patterns of suppressed results are consistent with those seen in the regression analysis.

Obviously it is also possible to control for other factors, however, many of these other effects are already proxied by employing the demographic variables used in the present analysis.

The other races involved in the analysis were controlled for in regressions but not displayed in the summary statistics because they were not a significant portion of the sample. They have particularly low representation rates in the aged 14 and over portion of the sample.

A differenced probit is used rather than a standard probit model in order to provide marginal coefficients on the right hand side variables. Issues of significance will not change when moving between the probit and the differenced probit model. It is only used for interpretation of results.

Notice that there will be different numbers of observations depending on whether we use the all-age sample or the age 14 and over sample and on which of the outcome risk characteristics we are employing since the samples were only balanced on the right hand side variables and not on the risk factors.

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Title: Religiosity and Adolescents’ Involvement with Both Drugs and Sex
Authors: Florence Neymotin
Teresa M. Downing-Matibag
Publication date: 01-06-2013
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Religion and Health / Issue 2/2013
Print ISSN: 0022-4197
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6571
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9507-3

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