Causal Models of Personality, Peer Culture Characteristics, Drug Use, and Criminal Behaviors over a Five-Year Span

Abstract

Since before the advent of the scientific study of drug use, there has been continuing social interest in determing how patterns of drug use may affect "deviant" or possibly criminal behaviors [see 3, for an illuminating historical perspective spanning millenia]. In this chapter we use latent variable causal models to explore the relationships between such constructs while recognizing that since we only have measures of self-reported deviance collected in the final year of our study, our results about the pattern of causality must be interpreted with caution.