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Social
Meanings of Drugs for Asian American Youth
Principal Investigator:
Juliet P. Lee, Ph.D.
This
study aims to investigate the social meanings of drugs and
drug use for Asian American youth. While Asian Americans are
typically considered to have low drug and alcohol use, some
troubling patterns of substance use have been identified in
specific subgroups; yet there have been few studies of drug
and alcohol use among young Asian Americans. The Principal
Investigator’s preliminary study of 31 drug-involved
Laotian and Cambodian youth in the San Francisco Bay Area
found that drug use practices and norms are entwined with
youths’ sense of identity, located within a hybridized
Southeast Asian youth culture, and as such these drug norms
reflect locally-based constructs of drugs and drug use.
Through
two waves of in-depth interviews with 140 currently or formerly
drug-involved Southeast Asian youths in the East Bay Area
over a five-year period, this proposed project will investigate
the relationship between drug constructs and sense of identity
in the drug pathways of these second-generation youth. The
proposed study will target males and females, and track changes
in drug use, sense of identity and drug constructs by conducting
two waves of interviews with youths aged 15-23 at the time
of the first wave of data collection. The proposed project
specifically aims to:
- Assess youths’
sense of identity of themselves and their primary peer group;
- Elicit youths’
understandings of the effects, consequences, costs, and
social valence of specific drugs, including validating the
pilot study findings on perceived associations of specific
drugs with ethnic, class, and neighborhood identities; and
- Describe
youths’ pathways from experimentation to occasional
or regular use of specific drugs, as well as to quitting,
as these pathways relate to changing sense of self and peer
group.
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