Effects of Peer Mentoring on HIV-Affected Youths' Substance Use Risk and Association with Substance Using Friends

Abstract

This study evaluates the effectiveness of peer mentoring (PM) for urban youth with a HIV-positive parent. Families were randomly assigned with a weighting procedure to a PM program centered around 20 older, trained peer mentors with adult supervision (59 families with 96 eligible youths), or control condition (35 families with 61 eligible youths). The youths were 51% male, 91% minority; mean age was 11.4 years. Outcomes measured one year later were: (1) friends' substance use; and (2) substance use risk, a composite measure of subject's substance use plus friends' substance use. Since only about half (53%) of assigned youths attended PMactivities, PM attendance frequency rather than group assignment was used as the variable representing program participation. Ordinary least squares regression was used to control for baseline covariates and multilevel modeling to control for the nested effect of youths within families. PM attendance predicted both outcomes for the two types of analysis. Results show that participating in peer mentoring activities may reduce the size of peer substance-user networks and substance use risk among vulnerable youth.