A Framework to Examine Gateway Relations in Drug Use: An Application of Latent Transition Analysis
Open Access
- 1 October 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Drug Issues
- Vol. 40 (4), 901-924
- https://doi.org/10.1177/002204261004000407
Abstract
A progressive and hierarchical sequence of drug use suggests that a sequence of stages of drug use can describe the order by which adolescents try drugs. We propose an operational definition to test gateway relations by providing a framework with the aim of describing a set of conditions to guide the evaluation of whether a drug serves as a gateway for another drug. We used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to demonstrate how using latent transition analysis we can estimate the odds of using a drug at a later time conditional on having used a gateway drug at an earlier time. We provide three empirical demonstrations for testing the gateway relations using a national and longitudinal data of adolescents (e.g., gateway relation between cigarettes and marijuana, alcohol and marijuana, and alcohol and cigarettes).Keywords
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