Given the racial and ethnic variations in rates and timing of onset of adolescent substance use (Ellickson & Morton, 1999; Hawkins, Catalano, & Miller, 1992; Jackson, 1997; SAMHSA, 2012; Wu, Temple, Shokar, Nguyen-Oghalai, & Grady, 2010), it is also important to consider racial and ethnic differences in the proposed meditational model. Although rates of substance use in adolescence are well-defined, racial and ethnic differences in the association between parental and adolescent substance use, and mediators of this relationship, have received little empirical attention and pertinent findings have been inconsistent (Barnes, Farrell, & Banerjee, 1994; Turner & Wallace, 2003; Vega, Zimmerman, Warheit, Apospori, & Gil, 1993). We thus examined whether the proposed mediated pathways varied among Hispanic/Latino, African American, and Caucasian adolescents.
