Racial/ethnic differences in the longitudinal progression of co-occurring negative affect and cigarette use: from adolescence to young adulthood

Abstract

Aims: This study examined the longitudinal progression of the co-occurrence of cigarette use and negative affect among the general population of U.S. adolescents and young adults and between racial/ethnic groups.

Methods: Data for this study consisted of Waves 4, 6, and 8 of the NLSY97 longitudinal study containing a nationally representative sample of U.S. adolescents and young adults. A total of 7979 adolescents (Mean age at Wave 4=17.98, SD=1.44, 49% female) were included in the analyses. To investigate the co-morbidity between negative affect and cigarette use, a latent factor of negative affect and single indicator of cigarette consumption were examined at each wave. A three wave Bivariate Autoregressive Cross-Lagged Effect Model was estimated to test the conjoint trajectory of negative affect and smoking.

Results: For all racial/ethnic groups prior negative affect status influenced future negative affect between waves and prior negative affect was positively related to increases in smoking in subsequent waves. The longitudinal trajectory of negative affect for the three racial/ethnic groups was the same, but racial/ethnic group differences were observed in the strength of the longitudinal relationship between previous and future cigarette use. Specifically, the following racial/ethnic differences were observed, even after controlling for the effect of SES; White young adults were found to exhibit the strongest association between cigarette use in the first two waves, followed by Hispanic individuals and lastly by African Americans. In the last two waves, African American young adults were found to have the strongest association between cigarette use at the latter two waves, followed by White individuals.

Conclusions: Both negative affect and cigarette consumption influence each other during the transition between late adolescence and young adulthood but the magnitude of the associations between cigarettes use across waves differed between racial/ethnic groups. Implications for prevention and treatment programs include considering both cigarette use and negative affect as two factors that jointly impact each other and that should be targeted simultaneously.

Fig. 1

Bivariate Autoregressive Cross Lagged model of negative affect and smoking adjusted by SES (N=7979)This Bivariate Autoregressive Cross Lagged model accounts for the longitudinal relationship between negative affect (down, depressed and nervous in the past month) and smoking (number of days smoked in the past month). The measurement part of negative affect has fixed loading factors across time and correlated errors across time. For the multi-group analyses, the residual variances of nervous, down, and depressed were fixed to one allowing free estimation of thresholds for identification purposes. All factor loads are significant at p<0.001. The model takes into account the correlated disturbances of endogenous measurements between negative affect and smoking. All crossed and lagged coefficients are constrained to be equal across group except for the lagged path of cigarettes and the effects of SES on negative affect and smoking. Group differences are presented according to the following font styles: Bold italic: African American (on top); Italic: white (in the middle); Bold: Hispanic (on the bottom); and normal font meaning no ethnic differences. *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001, dotted lines represent non-significant paths (coefficients not shown), and all factor loadings and residual variances are significant at p<0.001.