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Sexual Orientation, Partnership Formation, and Substance Use in the Transition to Adulthood

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

Evidence suggests that lesbian and gay young adults use substances more frequently than their heterosexual peers. Based on the life course perspective, we argue that this difference may be due to the unavailability of marriage as a turning point in the lives of lesbian/gay young adults. We use data from a nationally representative sample of youth (N = 13,581, 52.4% female, 68.6% white, ages 18—26) to examine sexual orientation differences in substance use and explore whether these differences vary by romantic partnership formation in young adulthood. We find that the formation of more serious partnerships (e.g., cohabitation, marriage) is associated with less frequent substance use among heterosexual young adults, though this pattern does not hold for lesbian and gay young adults. We conclude that the partnership options available to lesbians and gay men do not provide the same health-protective benefits that marriage does for heterosexuals.

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Notes

  1. Despite the small sample size for lesbian and gay youth, we determined that we had ample statistical power to detect effects—particularly for the larger group differences that we estimated at Wave 3. The only significant difference at Wave 1 was for hard drug use and had .54 statistical power assuming a two population sample comparison. The significant differences at Wave 3 for both hard drug use and marijuana use had .99 statistical power assuming a two population sample comparison.

  2. In accord with the broader literature in the sociology of gender and sexuality, we suspect that developmental trajectories vary both by gender and sexual orientation. Unfortunately, the small cell sizes preclude a more comprehensive look at these differences. In preliminary analyses not shown, we estimated our models while including a gender × partnership multiplicative interaction term. Though none reached statistical significance, there were large standard errors due to the low statistical power. Additional analyses comparing male-only and female-only models further demonstrated comparable effects of partnership formation on substance use for both groups. Without being able to determine whether these differences are truly null or if they reflect a type II error, we do not present these results nor are we able to discuss differences as they relate to the gender with confidence.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. This research benefited from the helpful comments and suggestions of Casey Borch, Karl Ulrich Mayer, Belinda Needham, Amelie Quesnel-Vallee, and Lily Trofimovich.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Heritage Hall 460-S, 1401 University Blvd., Birmingham, AL, 35294, USA

    Erika Laine Austin

  2. Labor and Population Division, RAND Corporation, 1776 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA, 90407, USA

    Robert Bozick

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  1. Erika Laine Austin
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Correspondence to Erika Laine Austin.

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Austin, E.L., Bozick, R. Sexual Orientation, Partnership Formation, and Substance Use in the Transition to Adulthood. J Youth Adolescence 41, 167–178 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-011-9653-7

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