Reciprocal Effects of Positive Future Expectations, Threats to Safety, and Risk Behavior Across Adolescence

We examined the reciprocal relationships among positive future expectations, expected threats to future safety, depression, and individual substance use and delinquency using 4 waves of data (N = 248–338) from African American and Latino adolescent male participants in the Chicago Youth Development Study. Individual positive future expectations and expected threats to safety were assessed at each wave and modeled as latent constructs. Individual substance use and delinquency were assessed at each wave and represented as ordinal variables ranging from low to high. Categorical autoregressive cross-lagged structural models were used to examine the hypothesized reciprocal relationships between both aspects of future expectations construct and risk behavior across adolescence. Analyses show that future expectations has important effects on youth substance use and involvement in delinquency, both of which in turn decrease positive expectations and increase expectation of threats to future safety across adolesce...