ABSTRACT
Investigators into the causes and consequences of adolescent drug use increasingly have taken a developmental approach. This conccrn with the developmental processes involved in drug use has led to efforts at integrating the various extant theories of delinquency, deviance, and drug use that offer narrower explanatory frameworks for the why and how of substance use by adolescents. These frameworks, some of which were reviewed in 1980 by Kandel, are based on cross-sectional or longitudinal data from only one developmental period, i.e., adolescence. One consequence of this concentration on adolescence has been a particular emphasis on peer influences, with friends’ use or nonuse of drugs as an explanatory variable, although in more recent research there also has been a focus on the crucial features of family dynamics that have to be borne in mind when considering possible causal effects.
