Multiple Substance Use Among Adolescents in Scotland: Profile and Trends

Footnotes

1. Regular smoking is defined as smoking at least one cigarette in the last week, regular drinking as having had an alcoholic drink in the last week and regular drug use as having used any drugs in the last month.

2. A regular smoker is classified as a pupil who reported usually smoking at least 1 cigarette a week.

3. Any mention of multiple substance use refers to the use of two or more substances regularly

4. Those that use any single substance participated in only one of the following activities: smoking regularly, drinking in the last week or taking drugs in the last month.

5. Missing values were treated slightly differently for the multiple substance use variable across different years of SALSUS data. A new method was applied in the time trends dataset so that the approach taken was consistent across all years. This accounts for the small discrepancy in regular smoking only figure (2%) in the report compared with the 2013 published figure (3%).

6. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) 2012 identifies small area concentrations of multiple deprivations across all of Scotland. It is used to compare data zones by providing a relative ranking from most deprived (rank 1) to least deprived (rank 6,505). It is common for cut-offs to be applied to the ranked data zones (e.g. into deciles or quintiles).

7. Some of these postcodes were incorrect due to scanning errors and were manually edited rather than imputed

8. http://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/population/population-estimates/special-area-population-estimates/population-estimates-by-simd-2012

9. Free school meals are provided to those whose parents receive benefits or incomes fall below a certain threshold. As such, free school meal entitlement is often used as a proxy for the level of deprivation of pupils' families.

10. Figures on free school meals entitlement were based on pupils' survey responses and not official records. Official records show 41,744 pupils (15% of pupils) were registered for free meals in Scottish secondary schools in 2013. In SALSUS 2013, 12% of pupils said they received free school meals - which is very similar. http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0047/00479422.pdf

11. Renfrewshire was not included in analysis due to small base sizes.

12. Base numbers for Orkney are low so this should be treated with caution.

13. In this instance, average knowledge is represented by the median score, rather than the mean.

14. The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) is a scale of 14 positively worded items, with five response categories, for assessing a population´s mental wellbeing.

15. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire about 3-16 year olds. The SDQ asks about 25 attributes, some positive and others negative. These 25 items are divided between 5 scales: emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems and pro-social behaviour. An overall difficulties score is collated from the first 4 scales.

16. These are the 5 individual scales that make up the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems and pro-social behaviour. Pupils are given a score for each individual scale that is classified as either normal, borderline or abnormal.

17. Answers in the 'other' category includes youth training, unemployed, don't know and those that said other.

18. Inclusion of earlier years risked the impact on some variables that had only been introduced recently (such as WEMWBS) being diluted.

19. This table is based on the logistic regression models reported in Table C2. "Yes, a lot" indicates log odds of less than 0.6 or greater than 1.67. "Yes, some" indicates log odds between 0.6 and 1.67 but a significant effect.
^† indicates that it may be a non-linear relationship or that the direction of the effect is not what might be assumed.

20. With the exception that number of close friends is not significantly correlated with smoking.