Youth & Substance Use
Youth is an important period of development and transition when usually risky behaviours occur. One of the new risks youths may experience is substance use. This research aims to identify phenotypes of risk profiles in the context of youth substance use and explore the dynamic transitions in use patterns across time. Taking advantage of an ongoing health survey from a sample of Canadian secondary school students and their attending institutions, both unsupervised machine learning methods and a hierarchical statistical modelling approach are employed in this research.