The Association between Depressive Symptoms, Substance Use, and Contraceptive Use among South African Adolescents

The current study will be looking at a dataset of South African teenagers, ages 14 through 17, from 15 different schools in the Free State Province. This dataset has a multitude of results from over two thousand participants with information on their depression, substance use frequency, and sexual behaviors in terms of contraceptive use. We will be assessing the relationship between depression and substance use. To do this, we will be using data from the CES-D scale. In addition, we will be using responses from the substance use section of the questionnaire. For this study, we will be utilizing the results for alcohol and marijuana as our outcome variables. We hypothesize that higher rates of depression within the last week will increase the frequency of substance use (i.e. alcohol use, marijuana use) in the past six months for South African adolescents. In addition, we will further explore the correlation between high levels of depression and contraceptive use, as well as high levels of substance use and contraceptive use. We hypothesize that higher levels of depressive symptoms will be associated with lower contraceptive use in South African adolescents. We hypothesize that higher frequency of substance use will also be associated with lower contraceptive use in South African adolescents.