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. 2018 Nov 20;18(1):1272.
doi: 10.1186/s12889-018-6205-z.

Clusters of alcohol and drug use and other health-risk behaviors among Thai secondary school students: a latent class analysis

Sawitri Assanangkornchai  1 , Jing Li  1   2 , Edward McNeil  3 , Darika Saingam  1
Affiliations

Clusters of alcohol and drug use and other health-risk behaviors among Thai secondary school students: a latent class analysis

Sawitri Assanangkornchai et al. BMC Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: Alcohol and drug use and other health-risk behaviors tend to cluster together among adolescents and contribute a large amount of harm to both themselves and to others. This paper aims to characterize secondary school students based on their clusters of health-risk behaviors and identify factors determining class membership to these behavior-clusters.

Methods: Data from a national school survey was used to identify clusters of alcohol and drug use and other health-risk behaviors among secondary school students aged 12-15 years using a latent class regression model. A multinomial logistic regression model was used to identify predictors of the cluster membership.

Results: A total of 25,566 students were included in the analysis, of which 88% were classified as having low-risk behaviors reporting only moderate alcohol use; 11% as having moderate-risk behaviors, such as driving under the influence of alcohol, fighting, carrying a weapon, and alcohol and tobacco use; and 0.6% as having high-risk behaviors, such as use of illicit drugs, particularly kratom and cannabis. Males, older students, those with a poor school performance, not living with parents, drug use by family members and peers, and having a low level of perceived disdain from their friends if they used drugs were significant risk factors for being in the moderate- and high-risk behavior classes.

Conclusions: Alcohol, tobacco and drug use, as well as other health-risk behaviors such as fighting, are clustered in Thai secondary school students. This result highlights the importance of comprehensive prevention and education strategies, particularly for moderate to high-risk groups.

Keywords: Alcohol; Health-risk behavior; Latent class analysis; Secondary school students; Tobacco and drug use.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The study was approved by the Ethics Committee for Research in Human Subjects of the Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Students were given information about the study objectives, their rights to participate or not, and the confidentiality of their information before answering the questionnaire. A waiver of the need for a document of consent for minors was approved from the institutional review board. As anonymity was guaranteed, the research involved no more than minimal risk to subjects and therefore the waiver of consent did not affect the rights and welfare of the subjects.

Consent for publication

Not applicable

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Item-response probabilities of health-risk behaviors for a three-class latent membership model. Health-risk behaviors: Violence/unintentional injuries: fig = Fighting; wea = Carrying a weapon; dui = Driving under the influence of alcohol. Intentional injuries: sui = Suicidal intentions. Alcohol consumption: alc = Drinks alcohol; hvy = Heavy drinking; bin = Binge drinking. Drug use: tob. = Tobacco; can = Cannabis; kra. = Kratom/kratom cocktail; met = Methamphetamine; cou = Cough syrup; ice = Crystalline amphetamine; opi = Opium; inh = Inhalants; ecs = Ecstasy; her = Heroin; coc = Cocaine; ket = Ketamine; anx = Anxiolytics
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