Are homeschooled adolescents less likely to use alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs?

200,824 school-attending respondents aged 12-17 (NSDUH 2002-2013)

Nationally representative US adolescents

Survey-weighted logistic regressions with demographic adjustment, comparing home-schooled adolescents to ALL non-home-schooled adolescents pooled together. That pooling is the design's weakness and is what Schepis 2020 later takes apart.

Home-schooled adolescents were less likely to report tobacco (AOR 0.76), alcohol (AOR 0.50), cannabis (AOR 0.56) and other illicit drug use, and less likely to meet criteria for alcohol (AOR 0.65) or marijuana (AOR 0.60) use disorder. They were more likely to strongly disapprove of peer drinking (AOR 1.23) and marijuana use (AOR 1.47-1.59), and reported less easy access to illicit drugs and fewer sales approaches.

High. Substance use is heritable and strongly predicted by parental religiosity, supervision and family structure — the exact variables that select families into home-schooling. No design element separates the delivery context from the family.

Direction replicates across NSDUH analyses, but the magnitude is an artifact of the comparison group: Schepis 2020, using the same survey with the schooled group split by dropout risk, finds home-schoolers WORSE than low-dropout-risk schooled adolescents on several substances.