Drug Use and Sexual Risk Taking in a Sample of High Risk Adolescent Women.

Although studies document increases in both contraceptive use, and, more recently, in condom use among adolescents, rates of unintended pregnancies remain high and sexually transmitted diseases in adolescents are rising. The data presented here represent the first wave of data obtained in an ongoing longitudinal study of the patterns of drug use among pregnant and parenting adolescents (N=241) ranging in age from 12-17 years (at the time of the initial interview), living in a three county metropolitan area in the Northwest. Fifty-one percent of the sample were White, 33% were African American, and 17% were members of other minority groups (e.g., Latino, Asian American, and American Indian). The study involved interviews with respondents once during pregnancy, and at 1, 6, 12, and 18 months after the birth of the baby. The majority of pregnant adolescents in the sample had a history of substance use. They had comparable or higher lifetime use rates than a national sample of female high school seniors. Over one-third of the sample had experienced sex with a casual partner, and 84 percent had more than one sexual partner. Alcohol use, cigarette use, and use of illicit drugs was related to sexual risk taking at the bivariate level, as has been found in previous research. However, when other variables were entered into the analysis along with substance use variables, the relationship between substance use and sexual risk taking disappeared. The three variables which shared the most variance with the substance abuse variables: years sexually active, race, and delinquency, were entered first in separate regression equations, followed by the substance use variable. The pattern of results was the same for all three. (LLL)