Berten et al. BMC Public Health 2012, 12:215 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/12/215 cannabis remains a serious public health concern and considerable and continuing efforts need to be con- ducted to develop effective interventions in this domain. Therefore, insight in risk factors that constitute teenage substance use is imperative. Several studies have shown that in adulthood socio- economic differences in alcohol and drug use are rela- tively consistent [11-13]. People from higher socio-eco- nomic strata tend to drink more often but in smaller quantities, while their counterparts in lower socio-eco- nomic strata tend to consume alcohol less often but in larger quantities and in a more problematic way. While the existence of class-based differences in alcohol and cannabis use among adults is well established, socio-eco- nomic differences in adolescents’ substance use are far less investigated, and consistency in present evidence is lacking. According to some research reports, the asso- ciation between socio-economic status (SES) and sub- stance use in adolescence is similar to patterns found in other life stages, where a lower SES is associated with increased incidence rates of alcohol and cannabis con- sumption [13-16]. On the other hand, several studies couldn’t corroborate these findings, reporting an insig- nificant, diminished or reversed relationship between a teenagers socio-economic position and his/her alcohol and cannabis use [17-20]. As a possible explanation for these inconsistencies, West and others [21,22] referred to the occurrence of “a process of equalization”, in which a transition is taking place from health inequality in childhood to relative equality during adolescence. According to these authors, this “process of equaliza- tion” is rooted in the defining characteristics of adoles- cence as a transitional period (i.e. the growing importance of peers, school environment and youth cul- ture), by which the influence of familial background gets sharply curtailed, resulting in a homogenizing effect [21,22]. However, it can be questioned whether this equaliza- tion process is a real-existing phenomenon or rather should be interpreted as an artifact, reflecting the way in which an adolescents’ socio-economic position is tradi- tionally measured, that is, using information about the parents’ socio-economic status (i.e. parental educational level, parental occupational level and family income) [23-25]. As youngsters strive to obtain more autonomy from their parents and develop their own identity, their social position gets increasingly determined by their own choices and life course plans [24,26-28]. Conse- quently, the use of merely parental SES markers as indi- cators of social status during adolescence may not be sufficient [27,29,30]. Following Bourdieu and Passeron [31] and others [24,26] we state that it may be more appropriate to use information about adolescents’ edu- cational level, as an indicator of their current individual Page 2 of 9 social position, since this determines to a large extent ones future social class group. According to Bourdieu and Passeron [31] the educa- tional system plays a fundamental role in the reproduc- tion of social inequalities. This reproduction works through a combination of selection and socialization processes. Selection refers to the differential validation of cultural capital in schools: students that possess the “right” (i.e. dominant middle class) cultural capital have greater chances for academic success, while other stu- dents flounder at lower levels of education. That way, scholars from lower social classes tend to concentrate in the lower status education types [32-35]. However, schools also socialize students into particular cultures: higher status education types socialize students towards the dominant middle class cultures, while lower status education types socialize towards lower class cultures [31,34,35]. Hence, the existing social order is maintained and social inequalities are even reinforced. Considering people’s health behavior, the awareness of such a pro- cess of reproduction calls the question whether social gradients in alcohol and cannabis use merely are the result of differences in students’ familial background or whether schools reinforce these inequalities. In Flanders, the educational level of a student can easily be assessed by the type of education the student follows. The Flemish secondary school system is highly tracked and mainly consists of three different types of education that can be ranked in difficulty level from vocational, technical, to general secondary education. General education is a type of education that provides students with a firm theoretic knowledge foundation for going into higher education. Technical education is both practice- and theory-orientated, so that students can either enter the job market directly or continue their studies in higher education. Vocational education is a mere practical type of education and prepares students to enter the job market directly. Unlike the existing literature on socio-economic dif- ferences, this research was conducted within a multicul- tural environment, i.e. Belgium’s capital region. The particular nature and assembly of this urban region shapes a unique context for this study, since it addition- ally allows us to examine whether the impact of an ado- lescents’ socio-economic position, as determined by both familial background and education type, on his/her consumption pattern, interacts with ones’ cultural ori- gin. Brussels is characterized by a large degree of ethnic diversity, clearly reflected in the composition of the stu- dents’ population in Dutch-speaking secondary educa- tion. Hence, migrant students make up about 60% of the secondary school student body. Furthermore, pre- viously conducted analyses [see [36]] illustrated that 75% of this migrant group are Muslims. Since Muslims