Sample description

Participants were recruited as 6^th and 7^th graders (Mean age = 12.1 years old, SD= 0.91) in 2008 (Wave 1; n=6,509) and followed for 10 years through 2018 (Wave 10; n=2,429). They were initially recruited from 16 middle schools in Southern California as part of a substance use prevention program, CHOICE (D’Amico et al., 2012). All participants consented to the study, and all procedures were approved by the institution’s IRB. Study procedures are reported in detail elsewhere (D’Amico et al., 2012). Briefly, participants completed waves 1 through 5 annually during physical education classes at 16 middle schools. Follow-up rates ranged from 74-90% during this time period, excluding new youth that could have come in at a subsequent wave. Adolescents transitioned from these middle schools to over 200 high schools following wave 5 and were subsequently re-contacted and re-consented to complete annual web-based surveys. At wave 6 (Spring 2013-Spring 2014), 61% of the sample participated in the follow-up survey. At the subsequent annual assessments, we retained 80% of the sample from waves 6-7, 91% of the sample from waves 7-8, 89% of the sample from waves 8-9, and 90% of the sample from waves 9-10. If a participant did not complete a wave of data collection, they were still eligible to complete all subsequent waves. That is, they did not “dropout” of the study once they missed a survey wave; rather we fielded the full sample at every wave so that all participants had an opportunity to participate in each individual survey. Failure to complete a certain wave was not significantly associated with demographics or risk behaviors, such as drinking and marijuana use, at Wave 10, similar to what we have found at earlier waves (D’Amico et al., 2018; Dunbar et al., 2018).

For the current investigation we use wave 10 data and restrict to Hispanic (45.2%), non-Hispanic White (23.8%), and non-Hispanic Asian (22.4%) youth given that there were few Black (2.3%), American Indian (0.2%), Native Hawaiian (0.7%), and Multiethnic (5.4%) youth. We further restricted our sample to first (20%) and second (80%) generation respondents given that as noted by Unger (2002) for third (and most certainly later) generation immigrants in the United States, the only relevant country is the United States, and therefore the items that ask participants about "the country my family is from" (i.e., the country of their parents other than the United States) may not be relevant to them. Restricting to these three racial/ethnic groups and to 1^st and 2^nd generation respondents resulted in an analytic sample of 1,399. We used this data to evaluate the psychometric properties of the AHIMSA scale to determine whether items function the same across these racial/ethnic groups, and ultimately, whether scores obtained were comparable across racial/ethnic groups.