Urban-rural differentials: a spatial analysis of Alabama students' recent alcohol use and marijuana use.

With the advent of new research methods in geography, researchers in other fields have begun exploring location as a factor in phenomena not traditionally viewed as geographic: for instance, certain aspects of human behavior 1. Our study therefore took a geographic spatial analysis approach to evaluating student substance use. Models we employed to explain students’ behavior incorporated the students’ locations as well as more typical social factors 2. Location provides important context for adolescent substance use: “Where” adolescents live and go to school implies “why” they use substances 3. The “why” question comprises structural and social factors associated with different locations, including substances’ potential availability in each location and the opportunity for, as well as the discouragement of, substance use which characterizes each location 4, 5. Structural and social factors can be defined as patterns of social arrangement and other conditions. Some such patterns pose disadvantages, sometimes constituting a risk of deviance or crime. For example, high rates of poverty, residential instability, and female-headed households suggest weak social organization and weak social networks. Weak social links diminish the sense of responsibility for others. In weakly organized, weakly networked neighborhoods, witnesses to crimes may keep quiet and adults may not involve themselves in the conflicts or other behaviors of “other people’s children”; lack of this type of informal guardianship leads to increased deviance and crime 6, 7–8. That differential structural and social factors characterize urban versus rural locations is well documented. The present study aimed to document hypothesized differences in how structural-disadvantage and social-organization factors exert the impacts they do on alcohol- and marijuana-use rates of public-school students in urban versus rural Alabama. Using population disadvantages, community instability, and alcohol-outlet density to indicate structural disadvantage, and using community and school to indicate social organization, the study was meant to evaluate whether and how students’ alcohol and marijuana use are explained by possible protective social-organization factors in locations having dissimilar levels of disadvantages built into the social structure. Admittedly, research findings on the role of urban versus rural location in adolescent substance use are inconsistent. Some suggest adolescents in rural areas are, in recent years, as or more likely than urban counterparts to use substances 9–12. Others continue to identify comparatively more adolescent substance use in urban areas—although even these findings suggest the gap is narrowing 13. The studies’ non-uniform definitions of urban and varying levels of analysis (i.e., individual-level, collective-level) account for some of the inconsistency 14, 15. But it is not necessary to know if these adolescent-substance-use rates are converging in order to know that, with few exceptions, the social mechanisms underlying levels of adolescent substance use in urban locations versus rural ones have not received much scientific attention 16, 17. To date, explanations of community rates of deviance have concentrated on characteristics of the population of the community and characteristics of the location, including both structural-disadvantage and social-organization factors 4. Researchers applying social disorganization theory (which focuses on the relationship between population characteristics and crime) have observed heightened risk of deviance in (typically urban) neighborhoods with a high level of poverty and residential instability plus minimal collective efficacy (encompassing social cohesion and community control of residents’ behavior) 18, 19. Routine activity theory has also been applied, in studies that emphasize the crucial roles of (a) opportunity for deviance and (b) absence of capable guardians impeding deviance, and that postulate characteristics of locations which may promote these phenomena (and thus deviance) 20, 21. Within the specific research field of adolescent substance use, both theories place higher levels of adolescent substance use in areas marked by extensive population disadvantages, residential instability, high alcohol-outlet density, and weak social organization and cohesion deriving from community or school 4, 8, 22. Given that social contacts and exchanges happen across communities and locations (e.g., people commute to work, visit friends at a distance, patronize bars and restaurants regardless of proximity), researchers have extended community contextualization of adolescent substance use to neighboring communities. They have in fact measured a spatial diffusion process by which substance-using behavior moves from location to location 23. The present study accepted that rural and urban locations often exhibit distinct structural-disadvantage and social-organization characteristics; it also assumed the operation of a spatial diffusion process helping explain adolescent substance use. The study’s aim was to compare, for urban versus rural areas, the social mechanisms that might link structural-disadvantage and social-organization characteristics to rates of student substance use. Two hypotheses were developed for the study: first, that each type of characteristic would exhibit unique associations with alcohol- and marijuana-use rates depending on whether adolescents lived in rural or urban locations; and second, that characteristics’ presence in neighboring communities would relate to a given focal community’s substance-use rates differently for urban areas than for rural areas.