Poly-victimization and opioid use during late adolescence and young adulthood: Health behavior disparities and...

Recent work has attempted to uncover heterogeneity in experiences of victimization. However, few studies have included important trauma-related characteristics such as known perpetrator, fear of life or injury, and negative reactions to disclosure. Little focus on potentially important subgroup differences including sexual/gender identity, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status as well as protective factors have been assessed.

Participants (N = 2,880) completed four annual surveys during late adolescence and the transition to young adulthood as part of an ongoing longitudinal study. Latent class analysis was used to extract classes of victimization and trauma-related characteristics. Latent class regression was used to understand how demographic covariates were related to class membership. Finally, discrete-time survival mixture analysis was used to assess latency to opioid use from ages 17 to 24 years, and how demographic and protective factors influenced opioid use across emergent classes.

The four-class solution fit the data best: sexual abuse and indirect violence + high trauma characteristics (n = 79, 3.6%); high all + high trauma characteristics (n = 177; 8.1%); chronic emotional abuse + trusted perpetrator (n = 263; 12.1%); and low all (n = 1,656; 76.1%). Latent class regression results indicated differential risk of class membership by sexual/gender minority status, sex assigned at birth, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Survival analysis noted shorter latency to opioid use across all classes compared to the low all class. Self-efficacy and neighborhood cohesion emerged as important protective factors.

Furthermore, results highlight key individual- and community-level protective factors that decrease the risk of opioid use. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).