-1/18- A Cross-National Comparison of Adolescent Substance Use in Stepfamilies, Single- and Two-Parent Families Anja Steinbach 1 & Sebastian Schnettler 2 1 Dept. of Sociology, University of Duisburg Essen 2 Dept. of Sociology, University of Konstanz Prepared for the CFR seminar „New Family Forms Following Family Dissolution: Consequences in/on Postmodern Society” 12-14 September 2012 in Leuven, Belgium Draft from September 3, 2012 (Please do not cite or circulate without authors' permission.) Contact: Prof. Dr. Anja Steinbach University of Duisburg-Essen Department of Sociology Lotharstraße 65 D-47057 Duisburg Germany Phone: +49 - 203 - 379 1344 Fax: +49 - 203 - 379 4350 e-mail: anja.steinbach@uni-due.de Abstract: We investigate adolescent risk behaviour regarding substance use in stepfamilies as compared to single- and two-parent families, using data from the “Health Behaviour in School- aged Children” study (HBSC), a World Health Organization (WHO) cross-national and cross- sectional survey administered to adolescents aged 11, 13, and 15 years. Given the possible long- term consequences of early risk behaviour for adolescents’ physical, mental, and social well- being over the life course, our goal is to identify differences in the prevalence of risk taking behaviour between these family types and to identify social resilience factors that moderate these differences. Such a detailed empirical analysis is possible because information on the extra- household family structure has been recorded in the HBSC study but also because pooling the data of 37 countries provides us with a very large dataset to distinguish even rare (step-)family constellations. Following our analysis, we first provide descriptive results on the prevalence of substance abuse in stepfamilies, single- and two-parent families across countries. Second, we present the results of a set of logistic regression models on substance use in adolescence, taking into account the unobserved within-country heterogeneity by conducting unconditional fixed effects models. Our results show that, after controlling for a range of relevant child and family characteristics and the relationship to parents and friends, adolescence in all family forms with complex constellations, including parent-child ties across households, show a higher level of substance use than adolescence in a two-biological-parent family. Children in single-biological- mother or single-biological-father households and without a second household, however, do not differ in their substance use from children who live with both of their biological parents.