Substance Use Expectancies: Measurement Invariance and the Mechanistic Role of Developmental Changes in Influences of Early Social Contexts on Subsequent Use Behaviors - II. Summary Abstract (30 lines) This project aims to improve the measurement and modeling of substance use expectancies to better understand risk and protective factors in the development of substance use (for alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, and e-cigarettes) in adolescence. Aim 1 focuses on identifying and correcting for sources of measurement noninvariance in early social contexts, substance use expectancies, and subsequent adolescent substance use behaviors across age, prior experimentation with substances, and key demographic variables. This includes deriving invariant factor scores for both positive and negative expectancies for each of the aforementioned substances, early social contexts (e.g., parenting, peers, and school factors), and substance use behaviors (e.g., onset, consequences of use). Specific social contexts include parental monitoring, measured via the Parental Monitoring Questionnaire (Karoly et al., 2016), and family environment measured via the Family Conflict subscale of the Family Environment Scale (Moos & Moos, 1994). Peer factors include single-item assessments of peer substance use (Freedman et al., 1988) and peer tolerance of use (Johnston et al., 2003; Johnston et al., 2016). Finally, school factors include environment, involvement, and disengagement, measured by the PhenX School Risk and Protective Factors Survey (Arthur et al., 2007). All measures selected are established instruments that have undergone psychometric evaluation and were chosen by the ABCD study team for their demonstrated validity and reliability in adolescent populations. Using the novel scores derived in Aim 1, Aim 2 characterizes changes in substance use expectancies from late childhood through mid-adolescence, modeling both the average trajectories within the sample, and discrete empirically derived patterns of changes characterizing latent subgroups. Aim 3 then examines the mechanistic role of changes in substance use expectancies in associations between early social contexts and adolescent substance use behaviors. This aim integrates the developmental expectancy trajectories from Aim 2 and the adjusted factor scores for pre-adolescent social contexts and adolescent substance use outcomes from Aim 1 to test a mechanistic model for the development of substance use behaviors.
