Associations of Electronic Media Communication with Adolescent Substance Use (HBSC)

With the increase in electronic media communication (EMC; e.g., texting, instant messaging) among adolescents (Valkenburg and Peter 2010), the contexts important for adolescents’ interactions with peers have expanded from the physical (offline) to the virtual (online) world (Brechwald and Prinstein 2011). Adolescents use EMC frequently to communicate and to develop and maintain close relationships with their peers (Lenhart, 2012). Previous research has shown that EMC is positively associated with adolescent substance use (e.g., Ohannessian 2009; Osaki et al. 2012). However, it remains unclear how these associations should be interpreted. On the one hand, these associations may reflect already established associations between offline interactions and adolescent substance use (e.g., Chassin et al. 2009; Kuntsche et al. 2009a). On the other hand, there may be unique and independent associations of EMC with adolescent substance. Hence, EMC is frequently used to display engagement in substance use (e.g., texting about or posting pictures of partying and drinking; Loss et al. 2013), and exposure to online displays of substance use by peers has been associated with adolescents own substance use (e.g., Huang et al. 2014; Stoddard et al. 2012). Given this gap in the literature, the current study examined the unique effects of EMC with friends on adolescent substance use (tobacco, alcohol, cannabis), over and beyond the effects of face-to-face (FTF) interactions with friends and the classroom norm (i.e., the average level of substance use by classmates) in a sample of 5.642 12- to 16-year-old Dutch adolescents drawn from the 2009/2010 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study (Roberts et al. 2009). Given the two-level hierarchical structure of the data (participants nested within classrooms), multilevel analyses were run. Descriptive statistics and correlations are presented in Table 1. The distributions of the behaviours were positively skewed (most adolescents did not engage in substance use). Table 1 shows that substance use behaviours were significantly and positively correlated with all predictor variables. More EMC, more FTF interactions, and a higher classroom norm were associated with more individual substance use. Results of the final multilevel Model 6 (including all fixed and random effects) are presented in Table 2. Use of each substance was significantly and positively associated with EMC. These main effects weakened slightly though remained significant after including FTF interactions and the classroom norm. Additional analyses revealed that the standardized effect of EMC was significantly stronger for alcohol use (β = .15) than for tobacco (β = .05, t(5180) = 3.33) or cannabis use (β = .06, t(5160) = 2.79, all ps < .01). Further, EMC strengthened the positive effects of FTF interactions after school on tobacco use, FTF interactions in the evening on tobacco and cannabis use, and classroom norm on alcohol use (all simple slopes p < .05). In summary, this study demonstrated that EMC is uniquely associated with adolescent substance use, over and beyond the effects of FTF interactions and the classroom norm. These findings imply that online behaviours should not be left unnoticed in both research and in substance use prevention programs.