Alcohol use among adolescent mothers: heterogeneity in growth curves, predictors, and outcomes of alcohol use over time.

This paper examines patterns of alcohol use over a 10-year period in a sample of adolescent mothers and includes both predictors and outcomes of young mothers' alcohol use patterns over time. This study used mixture modeling to identify latent trajectory classes based on alcohol consumption over 10 years. Results indicate that there is significant heterogeneity in alcohol use trajectories of adolescent mothers during the transition from adolescence to adulthood as well as significant predictors and outcomes that vary by latent class trajectory. Specifically, measures of the consumption of alcohol by both quantity and frequency yielded multiple latent trajectory classes. Alcohol quantity measures yielded a two-class model with higher and lower quantity users. Age at first drink significantly differentiated between the two classes indicating that the younger the respondent was, the more likely she belonged to the higher quantity user class. In addition, members of the higher quantity class had significantly more negative outcomes in adulthood. The second measure of alcohol consumption, alcohol frequency, yielded a four-class solution consisting of low-level users, early decliners, late decliners, and increasers. As with alcohol quantity, age at first drink significantly differentiated between classes, as did age at first birth, in the expected direction. Similarly, two classes with the greatest growth and patterns of use over time, late decliners and increasers, had significantly worse outcomes in adulthood. The results suggest that identifying underlying heterogeneity in alcohol use can be informative with regard to both predictors and outcomes for young women who were adolescent mothers. Results suggest that there are possible higher order factors that can account for the results of this study.