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Sarah W. Feldstein Ewing is now at Oregon Health & Science University.
These results were presented at a symposium at the Research Society on Alcoholism (Orlando, Florida, June 2013), National Hispanic Science Network (El Paso, Texas, September 2014), and the National Health Disparities Summit (National Harbor, Maryland, December 2014).
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health awards (R01 AA017878 to Sarah W. Feldstein Ewing; K01 AA021431 to Jon M. Houck). The authors have no competing financial or other conflicts of interest relating to the data included in the manuscript.
Brief addiction treatments, including motivational interviewing (MI), have shown promise with youth. One underexamined factor in this equation is the role of therapist behaviors. We therefore sought to assess whether and how therapist behaviors differ for Hispanic versus non-Hispanic youth and how that may be related to treatment outcome. With 80 substance-using adolescents (M age = 16 years; 65% male; 59% Hispanic; 41% non-Hispanic), we examined the relationship between youth ethnicity and therapist behaviors across two brief treatments (MI and alcohol/marijuana education [AME]). We then explored relationships to youth 3-month treatment response across four target outcomes: binge drinking days, alcohol-related problems, marijuana use days, and marijuana-related problems. In this study, therapists showed significantly more MI skills within the MI condition and more didactic skills in the AME condition. With respect to youth ethnicity, across both conditions (MI...