John E Schulenberg

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Psychology and Institute for Social Research

Objective: Limited prospective data exist about the impact of stimulant therapy for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during adolescence on the risk for later prescription drug misuse (PDM; i.e., of benzodiazepines, opioids, and stimulants). Methods: National longitudinal multicohort panels (baseline cohort years 2005-2017) of U.S....

Background To examine the associations between early onset of nonmedical prescription stimulant use (NPSU) and cocaine use. Methods Nationally representative samples of high school seniors were surveyed annually. Data were collected via self-administered questionnaires in nationally representative public and private schools in the United States (1...

Importance: The prescribing of stimulant medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has increased in the US. Prescription stimulants are one of the most commonly misused controlled substances during adolescence. Despite a 10-fold increase in stimulant-related overdose deaths in the past decade, the transitions from prescriptio...

Objective: Prescription benzodiazepines are among the most commonly used and misused controlled medications. The authors aimed to examine transitions from medical use of prescription benzodiazepines to prescription benzodiazepine misuse, prescription opioid misuse, and substance use disorder symptoms during adulthood. Methods: Eleven national co...

Importance: Recent information on the prevalence of prescription stimulant therapy for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and nonmedical use of prescription stimulants (NUPS) at the school-level among US secondary school students is limited. Objective: To investigate the school-level prevalence of and association between stimulant t...

Background: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with higher substance use rates. Stimulant and non-stimulant pharmacotherapy improve adolescent ADHD, but their associations with prescription stimulant misuse (PSM), cocaine, and methamphetamine use are unclear. Using 2005-2020 US Monitoring the Future data, we investigated...

Runaway youth may experience a myriad of challenges associated with significant risks to health and well‐being. To examine the prevalence and correlates of running away from home among US youth. Annual US nationally representative samples of 8th and 10th graders between 2005 and 2017 from the Monitoring the Future study. Self‐reports of nationally...

The objective of this study is to examine the extent to which involvement in high-contact, semi-contact, or non-contact sports during 12th grade is associated with the initiation and developmental course and of prescription drug misuse (PDM) between ages 17/18 and 27/28. Data were collected from a national multi-cohort panel sample of U.S. 12th gra...

Objectives Longitudinal survey data allow for the estimation of developmental trajectories of substance use from adolescence to young adulthood, but these estimates may be subject to attrition bias. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus regarding the most effective statistical methodology to adjust for sample selection and attrition bias when esti...

Importance: Although more than 1 in every 3 US individuals will develop a substance use disorder (SUD) in their lifetime, relatively little is known about the long-term sequelae of SUD symptoms from adolescence through adulthood. Objective: To evaluate the longitudinal associations between adolescents' SUD symptom severity with later medical use...

Background and objectives: Due to a reduction in the availability of prescription opioids in the United States, the potential transition from prescription opioids to heroin is a public health concern. We assessed trajectories of both nonmedical prescription opioid (NMPO) and heroin use from adolescence (age 18) to adulthood (age 50) and how these...

Purpose Parents’ attitudes about adolescent substance use likely guide their parenting behaviors. This study documents prevalence of parents’ disapproval of adolescent substance use and characteristics associated with disapproval. Methods Survey data from national samples of 35-year-old parents from the U.S. Monitoring the Future study were collec...

Objective The current study used U.S. national data to examine drinking trends prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, focusing on changes in U.S. young- and middle-adult alcohol prevalence, frequency, and drinking contexts and reasons, and whether they differed by age and college status. Methods Data from 2015 to 2020 from 16,987 young...

Historical analyses based on US data indicate that recent cohorts engage in lower binge drinking at age 18 relative to past cohorts, but by the mid- to late-20s the reverse is true: recent cohorts engage in higher binge drinking relative to past cohorts. We pinpoint when – both developmentally and historically – this reversal manifested, examine po...

Existing research focused on social role destabilization (historical increases in role instability) and destandardization (historical increases in variability of role instability) has primarily focused on discrete social roles during discrete periods of development. Building on this work, we applied a macro approach to elucidate the extent to which...

Importance US adults born from 1965 to 1996 had high exposure to controlled medications, yet little is known about how this exposure has affected them over time. Prescription drug misuse (PDM) has increased among adults in the past 2 decades, with related increases in emergency department visits, overdoses, and deaths. Objectives To identify 32-ye...

The current study examined how schoolwide norms came together into distinct profiles and how norm profile membership was linked to adolescent well‐being. Using school‐level (N = 786) and student‐level data (N = 174,587 12th grade students; 52% female; 64% White, 13% Latino, 12% Black, 12% other) from Monitoring the Future (MTF), we identified four...

Background Binge drinking among adolescents and young adults has changed over time, but patterns differ by age and gender. Identifying high‐risk groups to target future efforts at reducing drinking in this population remains a public health priority. Forecasting methods can provide a better understanding of variation and determinants of future bing...

Gender differences in binge drinking have converged in recent cohorts, due in part to faster decreases in consumption among boys in adolescence, and faster increases in consumption among women in young to middle adulthood. Changes in education and occupation explain a portion, but not all, of these differences; the present study examines how attitu...

Background Young adulthood is characterized by transitions into and out of social roles in multiple domains. Consistent with self‐medication models of alcohol use, the Transitions Overload Model (J Stud Alcohol Suppl, 14, 2002, 54) hypothesizes that one cause of increased alcohol use during young adulthood may be the stress of navigating simultaneo...

Background The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ™ Study (ABCD StudyⓇ) is an open-science, multi-site, prospective, longitudinal study following over 11,800 9- and 10-year-old youth into early adulthood. The ABCD Study aims to prospectively examine the impact of substance use (SU) on neurocognitive and health outcomes. Although SU initiation t...

Background: The Transitions Catalyst Model suggests increased drinking during young adulthood is due to the notion that alcohol facilitates friendships and romantic/sexual relationships during a developmental period when these relationships are highly valued. However, little research has tested the utility of this model. We examined (1) whether you...

Multifinality, equifinality, and fanning are important developmental concepts that emphasize understanding interindividual variability in trajectories over time. However, each concept implies that there are points in a developmental window where interindividual variability is more limited. We illustrate the multifinality concept under manipulations...

A full list of affiliations appears at the end of the paper. T he ABCD Study ® aims to characterize adolescent development and evaluate many influences that might shape developmental trajectories. While numerous factors are plausibly associated with neurodevelopment (for example, nutrition, sleep, exercise, head injuries and substance use), we have...

Aims To present national trends by age and cohort among middle-aged adults in the prevalence of AUD symptomology, by severity, sex, race, and education. Design National, multi-cohort longitudinal probability samples of US adults, with data collected at ages 35, 40, and 45 among 14 cohorts who reached age 45 between 2003 and 2016. Setting Data wer...

In 2016, 19.5% of US adolescents reported at least 1 concussion during their lifetime.¹,2 While knowledge about concussion and management of these injuries within the adolescent population have increased over the past decade,³ to our knowledge, no national study has tracked whether rates of concussion have declined or increased. This study estimate...

During adolescence, sensation seeking is linked to several adverse outcomes including substance use, risk taking, and psychopathology. Recent empirical interest in the construct of boredom has revealed that some similar associations may exist for boredom during adolescence. Both boredom and sensation seeking peak during adolescence, and yet, resear...

Objective: This study examined age-related change in alcohol use, marijuana use, and the association between the two, from ages 18 to 55, in a national longitudinal sample. Method: Data were from national Monitoring the Future study participants (N = 11,888) who were high school seniors in 1976-1980 and were eligible to respond to the age 55 sur...

Given the promise of the web push plus e-mail survey design for providing cost-effective and high-quality data (Patrick et al. 2018, 2019) as an alternative to a paper-and-pencil mailed survey design for the longitudinal Monitoring the Future (MTF) study, the current study sought to further enhance the web push condition. The MTF sample is based on...

Background and Objectives Reports on pediatric lifetime concussions/head injuries (LCHI) from national surveys have offered estimates on prevalence that range from 2.5% to 18% in the general population. The purpose of this study is to examine national surveys to compare methodologies and limitations pertaining to LCHI data collection. Methods Thre...

Objectives: To examine the longitudinal relationships between US adolescents' prescription opioid use and misuse and any subsequent heroin use in adulthood. Methods: Nationally representative samples of adolescents from 25 independent cohorts were surveyed via self-administered questionnaires and followed from ages 18 to 35 (n = 11,012). Adolesc...

Background and objectives: Opioid misuse and overdose remains a leading US public health concern, and many youth are first exposed to opioids via medical use. In this study, we examine school-level prevalence and correlates of medical use and misuse of prescription opioids among US 12th-grade students. Methods: A sample of 228 507 US 12th-grader...

Objective: This study estimated the percentage of age 35 and 55 adults reporting using medical marijuana intended for someone else (diverted use) and compared demographics and health status of such users with respondents reporting recommended use (i.e., individuals with a medical marijuana recommendation for their own health conditions) and to res...

Despite a growing understanding about civic development, we know little about whether the developmental course of civic engagement is the same across different types of civic engagement or different groups of youth. To advance developmental science in this area, we documented age-related change in community service, political interest, electoral pa...

Purpose Depression is increasingly common among US adolescents; the extent to which social media exposure contributes to this increase remains controversial. Methods We used Monitoring the Future data from 8th and 10th grade students (n = 74,472), 2009–2017, to assess the relationship between daily social media use and depressive symptoms. Self-re...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/2019 Demographic Subgroups Final.pdf

Objectives Survey nonresponse has increased across decades, making the amount of attrition a focus in generating inferences from longitudinal data. Use of inverse probability weights [IPWs] and other statistical approaches are common, but residual bias remains a threat. Quantitative bias analysis for nonrandom attrition as an adjunct to IPW may yie...

Purpose: This study estimated the prevalence of negative consequences associated with alcohol use in a national sample of young adults one or two years after graduating from high school, focusing on differences by college attendance, living situation, binge drinking, and sex. Methods: A subsample (N = 1068) of U.S. nationally representative Moni...

Aims The experiment tested the effects of a Web‐Push survey research protocol, compared with the standard mailed paper and pencil protocol, among young adults aged 19 to 30 in the ‘Monitoring the Future’ (MTF) longitudinal study. Design, Setting & Participants The U.S.‐based MTF study has measured substance use trends among young adults in panel s...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/Vol 1 2019 FINAL (original).pdf

Importance Policy changes since early 2017 have resulted in a substantial expansion of Latino or Latina immigrants prioritized for deportation and detention. Professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Society for Research in Child Development, have raised concerns about the potentiall...

Objective: Most studies linking physical victimization and substance use have focused on concurrent or temporally proximal associations, making it unclear whether physical victimization has a sustained impact on substance use problems. We examined the long-term associations between adolescent physical victimization and symptoms of substance use di...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/mtf-occ94.pdf

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/FINAL.pdf

Purpose: Boredom is an accepted part of adolescence. Developmental and contextual factors are likely to conspire to increase boredom during adolescence, which, in turn, relates to health risk behaviors. However, literature is lacking in the developmental course of boredom across adolescence as well as historical variation in boredom. The present s...

Background: No large-scale epidemiological survey of adolescents in the US has assessed the association between lifetime history of concussion, propensity toward sensation-seeking, and recent substance use. Methods: This study assesses the association between lifetime history of diagnosed concussions, sensation-seeking, and recent substance use (i...

Purpose: From 1991 to 2018, binge drinking among U.S. adolescents has precipitously declined; since 2012, depressive symptoms among U.S. adolescents have sharply increased. Binge drinking and depressive symptoms have historically been correlated, thus understanding whether there are dynamic changes in their association informs prevention and inter...

Background: Prescription drug misuse is most prevalent during young adulthood (ages 18-25 years). We aimed to identify prescription drug misuse trajectories for three drug classes (opioids, stimulants, and sedatives or tranquilisers) from adolescence into adulthood, assess the extent to which different trajectories are associated with symptoms of...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is an ongoing, nationwide study of the effects of environmental influences on behavioral and brain development in adolescents. The main objective of the study is to recruit and assess over eleven thousand 9-10-year-olds and follow them over the course of 10 years to characterize normative brai...

Background Mental health problems and mental health related mortality have increased among adolescents, particularly girls. These trends have implications for etiology and prevention and suggest new and emerging risk factors in need of attention. The present study estimated age, period, and cohort effects in depressive symptoms among US nationally...

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150623/1/2018-19 VOL II FINAL 2.pdf

This study examines the two-year follow up (data collected in 2016 at modal age 21/22) of an original mixed-mode longitudinal survey experiment (data collected at modal age 19/20 in 2014). The study compares participant retention in the experimental conditions to retention in the standard Monitoring the Future (MTF) control condition (participants...

It is unclear how autonomy-related parenting processes are associated with Latinx adolescent adjustment. This study uses Latent Profile Analysis to identify typologies of parental monitoring and parent–adolescent conflict and examines their association with Latinx youth’s school performance and depressive symptoms. The sample included 248 Latinx 9t...

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150622/1/Vol 1 2018 FINAL3.pdf

Background and aims: As the legal status of cannabis changes across the United States and modes of administration expand, it is important to examine the potential impact on adolescent cannabis use. This study aimed to assess changes in prevalence of frequent cannabis use in adolescents in the United States and how far this varies by age and cohort...

Subjective wellbeing (i.e. life satisfaction and happiness) impacts youth's social, economic and political participation. Prior studies have documented cross-national variation in subjective wellbeing of adults but there is a lack of data on the prevalence and correlates of subjective wellbeing among youth in low and middle income countries. This p...

Background: The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a critical life phase as it is during this period that substance use and disorders typically emerge and escalate. Globally, few studies have examined the prevalence and correlates of alcohol and tobacco use among youth (ages 15-24). This study seeks to bridge this gap by assessing the inf...

Background This study examined the extent to which the developmental pattern of prevalence of binge drinking in the past 2 weeks from ages 18 through 30 has changed across 29 cohorts of U.S. young adults, and whether the changes differed by gender. Methods Analyses used national longitudinal data from 58,019 12th‐grade students (from graduating hi...

This study examines intergenerational continuity (mean level similarity) and stability (maintenance of rank ordering of individuals) in age and marital status at the time of becoming a young parent using prospective data from 3 generations of 585 families. G2 participants were recruited at the age of 5 years and followed until the age of 28, by whi...

Background and Aims Long‐term frequent marijuana use is associated with significant negative outcomes, yet little is known about the longitudinal course of marijuana use among those who start frequent use during adolescence. Objectives are (a) to identify latent patterns of within‐person marijuana use from ages 19‐30 among 12th graders reporting fr...

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150621/1/Overview 2018 FINAL print 2-25.pdf

Purpose: To examine standard binge drinking (≥4 drinks for females, ≥5 drinks for males) and high-intensity binge drinking (≥8 drinks for females, ≥10 drinks for males) among heterosexual and sexual minority youth in the US and whether reports of school-based victimization mediate this association. Methods: Survey data are from the 2015 Youth Ri...

The study examines how young adult transitions into and out of social roles (i.e., starting or ending a job, a romantic relationship, school) are associated with drinking motives (coping, enhancement, social, and conformity) and alcohol use in a given month. A community sample of young adult drinkers (N = 767; 56.3% female; 59.3% White; Ages 18–23)...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is an ongoing, nationwide study of the effects of environmental influences on behavioral and brain development in adolescents. The ABCD Study is a collaborative effort, including a Coordinating Center, 21 data acquisition sites across the United States, and a Data Analysis and Informatics Cent...

Purpose: Examine lifetime prevalence of diagnosed concussion in US-national samples of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders involved in 16 different competitive sports; examine associations between concussion and individual sports, controlling for demographic characteristics and multiple sports involvement. Methods: Analysis of nationally representative...

Background: This longitudinal study assesses characteristics associated with adolescents' nonmedical use of prescription opioids (NMUPO) including: frequency, co-ingestion, motives, specific opioid type; sequence of initiation of medical use of prescription opioids and NMUPO in relationship to subsequent substance use disorder (SUD) symptoms. Met...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/2020 FINAL FINAL.pdf

The field of child welfare has historically focused on physical safety and legal permanency with little emphasis on child well-being or the importance of social relationships in positive youth development. We add to the literature regarding child well-being among African American adolescents in care—a group that is overrepresented within the foster...

Objective: Marijuana use is relatively common among youth and increases during the transition to adulthood. Yet a substantial number of adolescents and young adults do not use marijuana. The purpose of this study was to examine how high school seniors' reasons for intending not to use marijuana within the next 12 months were prospectively associat...

Objective: The current study examines the prevalence, stability, and correlates of simultaneous alcohol and marijuana (SAM) use among underage US young adults, a population at high risk for participating in this behavior. Method: Analyses used data from 1719 respondents (46.8% men) who participated in the nationally representative 12th-grade Mon...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/null/1/2019-20 VOL II FINAL 3.pdf

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137821/1/mtf-vol1_1993.pdf

Purpose: To assess how social fraternity involvement (i.e., membership and residence) in college relates to substance use behaviors and substance use disorder symptoms during young adulthood and early midlife in a national sample. Methods: National multi-cohort probability samples of US high school seniors from the Monitoring the Future study we...

Background: National trends in adolescent's marijuana risk perceptions are traditionally used as a predictor of concurrent and future trends in adolescent marijuana use. We test the validity of this practice during a time of rapid marijuana policy change. Methods: Two repeated cross-sectional U.S. nationally-representative surveys of 8th, 10th,...