Prevalence and co-occurrence of addictive behaviors among former alternative high school youth: A longitudinal follow-up study

Background and Aims: Recent work has studied addictions using a matrix measure, which taps multiple addic-tions through single responses for each type. This is the first longitudinal study using a matrix measure. Methods: We investigated the use of this approach among former alternative high school youth (average age = 19.8 years at baseline; longitudinal n = 538) at risk for addictions. Lifetime and last 30-day prevalence of one or more of 11 ad-dictions reviewed in other work was the primary focus (i.e., cigarettes, alcohol, hard drugs, shopping, gambling, Internet, love, sex, eating, work, and exercise). These were examined at two time-points one year apart. Latent class and latent transition analyses (LCA and LTA) were conducted in Mplus. Results: Prevalence rates were stable across the two time-points. As in the cross-sectional baseline analysis, the 2-class model (addiction class, non-addiction class) fit the data better at follow-up than models with more classes. Item-response or conditional probabilities for each addiction type did not differ between time-points. As a result, the LTA model utilized constrained the condi-tional probabilities to be equal across the two time-points. In the addiction class, larger conditional probabilities (i.e., 0.40–0.49) were found for love, sex, exercise, and work addictions; medium conditional probabilities (i.e., 0.17–0.27) were found for cigarette, alcohol, other drugs, eating, Internet and shopping addiction; and a small con-ditional probability (0.06) was found for gambling. Discussion and Conclusions: Persons in an addiction class tend to remain in this addiction class over a one-year period