Article Summary 3: Troubled Parents, Motivated Adolescents: Predicting Motivation to Change

Substance Use among Runaways

The motivation to change is described as a commitment to change a behavior regarding one’s goals,
needs, concerns and intentions. This is examined in the adolescent runaway population int his study.
Runaway adolescents are described as the youth who left their home at least for 24 hours without the
permission of their parents or primary caretakers (PC). The reasons why this population was chosen is
that high rates of depressive symptoms, family problems and substance use are found in this population
and this study was intended to reveal their interaction. Moreover, the claim that is offered by the family
systems theoretical framework suggests was aimed to be tested int his study as well, which is that
adolescents’ problematic behaviors including substance or alcohol use is a result of a maladaptive family
interaction patterns.

Therefore, the current study designated their objectives as the level of depressive symptoms, substance
use severity and motivation for change. Researchers decided to include both parent and adolescent
reports by controlling the gender and ethnicity so that they hypothesized that perceived family
environment will affect adolescents’ motivation to change. Furthermore, this effect will be mediate by
depressive symptoms of both parents and adolescents as well as the level of substance use. Specifically,
they expected to see lower adolescent motivation to change if they perceive the family environment
negatively and also to see that this relationship is mediated by higher depressive symptoms and
substance use.

140 parent-child parents were involved in the study. CDISC was used for the diagnosis of alcohol,
tobacco and other substance abuse. Beck Depression Inventory was used for depressive symptoms. For
adolescents 90 and for parents/PCs 30 days of any use was determined. Family Environment Scale was
used to assess the social-environmental characteristic of families. Lastly, SOCRATES was used to conceive
the stages in which the individual takes place for his/her substance use: recognition of drinking problems
(readiness), uncertainty about drinking (ambivalence), making efforts to change drinking (taking steps).

Both PCs’ and adolescents’ depressive symptoms were found to be mild. No direct influence of family
variables to the motivation to change or substance use were found to be significant. This supported the
hypothesis that there is mediating impact of intraindividual variables. Depressive symptoms predicted
higher substance abuse for both PCs and adolescents. Moreover, the more positive PCs interpreted the
family environment, less depressive symptoms they revealed. Interestingly, when PCs had more
depressive symptoms, adolescents were found to have more motivation to change. In other words,
when the family environment is negative, PCs experienced more depressive symptoms and then
adolescents were more motivated to change. In that sense, the results are in the opposite direction of
what was initially expected. Firstly, this result is interpreted by the researchers as parents with more
depressive symptoms being less involved in adolescents’ lives so paradoxically adolescents are left more
motivated to change. Secondly, it is explained with the stress level of adolescents caused by more
depressed PCs where the higher level of stress causes a motivation to change. On contrary to family
systems theoretical framework, this study did not discover any impact of family environment on the
severity of substance use. Moreover, including peer relations, the possibility that PCs and adolescents
might have lied about their level of substance use and the type of the families who accepted to
participate in the study (that they can significantly differ from the ones who denied participating in terms
of the motivation to change) must be further examined.