Gender differences in the association between substance abuse and lifestyles among high school students in Japan: findings from the 2009 Japanese School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs

The purpose of this paper is to clarify gender differences in the association between substance abuse measures and lifestyle variables among Japanese high school students. The data was obtained from the nationwide representative sample of the Japanese School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (JSPAD) conducted in 2009. The sample consisted of 25,242 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-year students at full-time high schools, which were selected by stratified, single-step cluster sampling. The results indicated seven principal findings. (1) All levels of cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and any illicit drug use throughout one's lifetime and the past year among high school students in 2009 were lower than those of the 2004 JSPAD. (2) The levels of lifetime and annual alcohol consumption among high school females were significantly higher than those of high school males. (3) Gender differences in the association between the measures of smoking or use of any illicit drug and lifestyle variables were more effective than those between drinking measures and lifestyle variables. (4) More recent alcohol consumption was likely to be less effective for gender differences in the association between drinking measures and lifestyle variables. (5) The combination of gender and "hours worked in a paid job" was generally most predictive for substance abuse measures. (6) Gender differences of "participating in extracurricular activities" and "eating breakfast" were significantly effective in the association with all substance abuse measures. (7) The orders of lifestyle variables combined with gender by model-fitting were stable for each substance, especially cigarettes and illicit drugs. The findings suggest that females are more likely to be vulnerable to isolation and irregularity of life than males, whereas the association patterns of lifestyles with substance abuse are highly similar between males and females while in high school, except for the differences in user proportion for each respective substance. Language: ja