Perinatal substance use, residential instability, and negative behavioral outcomes among adolescents: Lessons from the maternal lifestyle study.
Brandi P Cotton, Matthew C Lohman, Jessica M Brooks and 1 others
PMID 29602191WHAT IT FOUND
Adolescents who had three or more moves or homelessness in earlier years were more often seen with delinquency, school problems, tobacco or alcohol use, and arrests.
The pattern held whether or not they had prenatal cocaine or opiate exposure.
Key findings
01Three or more moves were associated with crimes against people and school delinquency.
02Homelessness was associated with vandalism and school delinquency.
03The associations were similar for adolescents with prenatal cocaine or opiate exposure and for adolescents without that exposure.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The study cannot show that moving or homelessness caused delinquency. It only measured association. The researchers did not know why families moved, and they did not measure school changes or neighborhood disadvantage, which are linked to delinquency. Delinquency was based on adolescent self-report, and the screening tool had no psychometric information reported. Police arrests were measured at age 15 while other delinquency outcomes were measured at age 16, so the timing of exposure and arrest is uncertain. The exposed and comparison groups were not matched on tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana exposure, so other prenatal exposures may have contributed. The final analysis used 736 participants after missing-data criteria, and only 710 for the arrest outcome, so some original participants were excluded. Most families were low income, so the findings mainly describe low-income contexts.
Declared interests
Funding came from a National Institute of Health grant. The supplied text does not report author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that moving or homelessness causes adolescent delinquency. This was an observational study, and the researchers did not measure why families moved, school changes, or neighborhood disadvantage, so other factors may explain the associations.