Perceived Teacher Encouragement as Buffer to Substance Use in Urban African American Adolescents: Implications for Disconnected Youth

Abstract

The variety of experiences of African American adolescents is still misunderstood and neglected. Empirical and lay reports consistently report that drug use is rampant within African American communities despite the fact that national statistics show that African Americans engage in substance use less than their White counterparts. Thus, the current study investigates the relations between African American adolescents’ school encouragement, academic future expectations (AFE), and substance use engagement. The participants are 206 African American adolescents (females = 65.7%), mean age 15.78 (SD = 1.18), who reside in a southern, urban city. The regression results indicated that there was an inverse, trend level relation between school encouragement and the global substance use assessment (β = −.05, p < .10; ΔR² = .02). AFE moderated the relation between school encouragement and all of the substance use variables except alcohol. Simple slopes analyses revealed that AFE only significantly moderated the relation between school encouragement and substance use for students who reported low levels of AFE, indicating that increased school encouragement may serve as a protective factor against substance use engagement for those students who may be disconnected from academic achievement.