-year period. During the period of data collection, 48 adolescents experienced the disruption of their parents' marriage.
Because of the longitudinal nature of the study, data were available at an average of 12 months before the separation and five months after the divorce. The control group consisted of the 578 adolescents in the original sample whose parents remained continuously married. According to Doherty and Needle, the most important finding of the study was a striking gender difference in the timing of the effects of divorce, with boys demonstrating ill effects (including substance use/abuse) after the divorce but not prior to the separation, and girls tending to use/abuse substances prior to the separation but the problems not becoming worse after the divorce.
Fifty-eight consecutive suicides committed between 1984 and 1987 by adolescents and young adults (age 15 29 years) from an urban community were the subject of retrospective investigations conducted by Runeson (1990). Methods included interviews with survivors and analyses of registers and medical records. Analyses revealed that psychoactive substance use disorder in accordance with DSM-III-R was present in 47 percent of the youth suicides investigated, predominantly as alcohol dependence. Dependence had developed in all females and most males. The median duration of substance use was 9 years. Substance use preceded suicidal behavior by two years.
Efforts to determine factors associated with substance abuse indicated that several factors were contributive. These factors were: depression, the presence of borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia, exposure to parental substance misuse, and parental divorce.
In a study conducted by Stoker and Swadi (1990), a group of 15- to 16-year-old adolescents were asked to report on their perception of their own family relationships, previous family experiences and their perceptions of their relationships w...