Vietnamese ethnicity and adolescent substance abuse: Evidence for a community‐level approach

This paper examines how membership in a highly concentrated Vietnamese‐American community affects the drug and alcohol use of Vietnamese‐American secondary school students. It suggests that research on adolescent substance abuse has had a tendency to concentrate on the family environment and the peer group. For this ethnic group, however, the present study finds that involvement in the ethnic community has a strong negative effect on drug and alcohol abuse, both directly and indirectly, through lessening the likelihood that adolescents will have substance‐abusing friends. Vietnamese language use is found to be an especially influential aspect of ethnicity. It is suggested that research on adolescent substance abuse should place more emphasis on community‐level explanations, such as the effect of ethnic and other sorts of social groups that surround individuals and families.