The relationship between hobbies and substance misuse in adolescents

The history of medicine and social science is littered with the wreckage of ostensibly good ideas that were founded on the belief that an epidemiological association was causal. When interventions are developed on this basis, the intervention often disappoints. Beware assumptions regarding causality!

This study was published last year and is based on a secondary analysis, mainly by UK researchers, of data available from a longitudinal cohort study of adolescents in the USA. The paper offers really interesting insights about the dynamic relationship between ‘hobbies’ (somewhat idiosyncratically defined, including, in later data points, ‘shopping for fun’) and the commonest forms of substance misuse in…