Risk prone or risk adverse: Sensation seeking and adolescent health risk behavior

This paper examines how adolescent risk proneness (sensation seeking) in conjunction with psychosocial factors (mastery, self-esteem and depression) and environmental influences (parenting and neighborhood quality) predict likelihood to engage in deleterious health risk behaviors, i.e. alcohol, tobacco use and sexual activity. Using the NLSY 1998 young adult cohort (ages 14-21), scales based on Rosenberg self-esteem, Pearlin mastery and CES-D depression measures are formulated, together with neighborhood and parent-child relationship assessments, and Zuckerman risk propensity self-evaluation (all with Cronbach's alpha reliability =.7) to test the multivariate relationship on the outcome severity indexes of high tobacco and alcohol utilization, and sexual involvement. In preliminary models, discriminant and MANCOVA analyses (n=354) are applied to elucidate profiles of adolescents at higher and lower risk of early substance use and sexual behavior initiation. These statistical classification methods, then, reveal that younger white males with higher self-esteem, higher mastery, higher depressive symptoms, but poorer parenting and lower quality neighborhoods, have higher self-rated risk proneness scores, indicating they are more likely to engage in conduct detrimental to health (with significance less than .05). Similarly, younger black females with higher self-esteem, lower mastery, lower depression and poorer parenting and lower neighborhood quality also have greater propensity to appraise themselves as risk prone. Indeed, interaction between socio-emotional environment and sensation seeking during teen years can set the stage for later-life deleterious health outcomes. Thus, risky behavior patterns established in early adulthood have implications for a life course trajectory of co-morbid mental and physical conditions in middle and older adulthood.