April 17th, 2014
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RSS Mar 25 26 CEN CENELEC StandarDays Training CEN CENELEC Meeting Centre (Belgium) Apr 03 Sector Forum Energy Management Conference CEN CENELEC Meeting Centre (Belgium) Oct 30 Standards your innovation bridge Conference (Belgium) More Events RSS WS 71 Third draft CWA VANESSA Draft CWA for comments 2014 04 19 WS 72 Sustainable Value Creation in manufacturing networks SustainValue Draft CWA for comments 2014 03 11 WS SERES Standards for Electronic Reporting in the Engineering Sector Draft CWA for comments 2014 02 28 More Workshops RSS Call for experts Safety of Toys Migration of Certain Elements DEADLINE 2014 02 27 Published on 2014 01 13 A Technical Project Leader on the Revision of EN 71 3 A Peer Review Laboratory on the Revision of EN 71 3 A Statistician to support the revision of EN 71 3. Call for Project Team Experts Call for Project Team Experts in the field of Electronic Passenger Transport Information Systems (EPTIS). DEADLINE 2014 02 28 Published on 2014 01 12 Call for Project Team Experts for the execution of the work called for in the Grant Agreement 2012 25 in the field of Electronic Passenger Transport Information Systems (EPTIS). Call for tender Sub contractor to administer the Keymark in the domain of CEN DEADLINE 2014 04 25 Published on 2014 02 25 Public call for tender for the selection of a sub contractor to administer the Keymark in the domain of CEN. More Calls RSS CEN workshops (pdf, 183 KB) Published on 2014 02 19 Explains what a CEN Workshop is all about, how it works and how you can join or start your own Workshop. Workshop ORCHID (pdf, 308 KB) Published on 2014 02 19 ORCHestrating Industrial Data Roadmap for standardising information across the oil, gas, process and power industry plant engineering supply chain The CEN ORCHID Roadmap Standardising information in the plant engineering supply chain (pdf, 1190 KB) Published on 2014 02 19 Direction & Framework The CEN ORCHID Roadmap Standardising information in the plant engineering supply chain (pdf, 1236 KB) Published on 2014 02 19 Implementation Guide Workshop STAND ODR (pdf, 1740 KB) Published on 2014 02 19 Standardization of Online Dispute Resolution tools More Brochures
American teens are less likely than european teens to use cigarettes and alcohol, but more likely to use illicit drugs — sciencedaily
The results originate from coordinated school surveys about substance use from more than 100,000 students in some of the largest countries in Europe like Germany, France and Italy, as well as many smaller ones from both Eastern and Western Europe.
Because the methods and measures are largely modeled after the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future surveys in this country, comparisons are possible between the U.S. and European results. The 15 and 16 year old students, who were drawn in nationally representative samples in almost all of the 36 countries, were surveyed last spring. American 10th graders in the 2011 Monitoring the Future studies are of the same age, so comparisons are possible.
The differences found between adolescent behaviors in the U.S. and Europe are dramatic, according to Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the American surveys.
About 27 percent of American students drank alcohol during the 30 days prior to the survey. Only Iceland was lower at 17 percent, and the average rate in the 36 European countries was 57 percent, more than twice the rate in the U.S.
The proportion of American students smoking cigarettes in the month prior to the survey was 12 percent again the second lowest in the rankings and again only Iceland had a lower rate at 10 percent. For all European countries the average proportion smoking was 28 percent, more than twice the rate in the U.S.
“One of the reasons that smoking and drinking rates among adolescents are so much lower here than in Europe is that both behaviors have been declining and have reached historically low levels in the U.S. over the 37 year life of the Monitoring the Future study,” Johnston said. “But even in the earlier years of the European surveys, drinking and smoking by American adolescents was quite low by comparison.
“Use of illicit drugs is quite a different matter.”
The U.S. students tend to have among the highest rates of use of all of the countries. At 18 percent, the U.S. ranks third of 37 countries on the proportion of students using marijuana or hashish in the prior 30 days. Only France and Monaco had higher rates at 24 percent and 21 percent, respectively. The average across all the European countries was 7 percent, or less than half the rate in the U.S.
American students reported the highest level of marijuana availability of all the countries and the lowest proportion of students associating great risk with its use factors that may help to explain their relatively high rates of use here, according to Johnston.
The U.S. ranks first in the proportion of students using any illicit drug other than marijuana in their lifetime (16 percent compared to an average of 6 percent in Europe) and using hallucinogens like LSD in their lifetime (6 percent vs. 2 percent in Europe). It also ranks first in the proportion reporting ecstasy use in their lifetime (7 percent vs. 3 percent in Europe), despite a sharp drop in their ecstasy use over the previous decade. American students have the highest the proportion reporting lifetime use of amphetamines (9 percent), a rate that is three times the average in Europe (3 percent). Ecstasy was seen as more available in the U.S. than in any other country.
For some drugs, however, the lifetime prevalence rate in the U.S. was just about the average for the European countries, including inhalants (10 percent), cocaine (3 percent), crack (2 percent), heroin (1 percent) and anabolic steroids (1 percent).
“Clearly the U.S. has attained relatively low rates of use for cigarettes and alcohol, though not as low as we would like,” Johnston said. “But the level of illicit drug use by adolescents is still exceptional here.”
This was the fifth coordinated data collection in Europe as part of the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs, the first being held in 1995 with 26 countries participating. The research plan this time was for each country to generate a representative national sample of 15 and 16 year olds with at least 2,400 students being surveyed. All samples were nationally representative, except those in Germany, Russia, Flanders (the Dutch part of Belgium) and Bosnia Herzegovina. In each of these cases a sub national representative sample was surveyed, such as Moscow in the case of Russia.
The European survey group was led by Swedish sociologist Bjorn Hibbell, who has worked in the substance abuse field for many years. The American survey is led by social psychologist Lloyd Johnston, who has served as principal investigator of Monitoring the Future since its inception 37 years ago. MTF, which is conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, had a sample of 15,400 10th grade students in 126 high schools in the 2011 survey. Students completed confidential, self administered questionnaires right in their classrooms in both the American and European surveys.
Full European report
Monitoring the Future
