Table 1.

U.S.-born Mexican and Mexican immigrant youth sample characteristics: Percentages, means and standard deviations

	First Generation (24.19%)	Second Generation (65.12%)	Third Generation (10.70%)

	%/Mean (SD)	%/Mean (SD)	%/Mean (SD)
Independent Variables^a
Demographics
Male	46.92	46.00	51.30
Female	53.08	54.00	48.70
Age (at baseline)	11.13 (0.77)	11.03 (0.74)	11.10 (0.68)
Assimilation
Language spoken with parents
Spanish	96.15	78.86	20.00
English/English and Spanish	3.85	21.14	80.00
Language conflict between child and parent	60.77	82.71	41.74
Proportion of non-Hispanic friends
Few or none	60.38	55.00	49.57
Less than half	30.38	32.71	33.91
Half or more	9.23	12.29	16.52
Proportion of non-Hispanic neighbors
Few or none	54.23	43.00	47.83
Less than half	34.62	41.00	45.22
Half or more	11.15	16.00	6.96
Length of time lived in U.S. (immigrant only)
Less than 5 years	46.54	-	-
More than 5 years, less than 10 years	40.77	-	-
At least 10 years	12.69	-	-
Family and communication
Family support index (range 0-6)	4.84 (1.31)	4.70 (1.35)	5.15 (1.07)
Perception of peer substance use
At least a few peers use alcohol	42.69	34.00	36.52
Dependent Variable
Alcohol use (overall)^b	20.77	16.57	11.30
Alcohol use by wave 2	10.00	5.29	2.61
Alcohol use by wave 3	24.22	21.90	12.28
Alcohol use by wave 4	32.81	24.86	23.33

n=1,075 observations contributed by 441 persons

Demographic variables (except age) are measured only at baseline; all other predictors are lagged one wave.

Overall alcohol use may be lower than alcohol use reported at each wave because it represents the pooled proportion of all respondents across all waves of data, whereas alcohol use at each wave represents the proportion of users only among those respondents participating in that particular wave.