| | National
Study of Risk Factors For Adolescent Drug Use
Principal
Investigator: Robert L. Flewelling, Ph.D.
PIRE Chapel Hill Center
Co-Principal
Investigator: M.J. Paschall, Ph.D.
Strategies
for understanding and preventing adolescent substance use
and other health risk behaviors have in recent years become
increasingly couched in a risk and protective factor framework.
Epidemiologically-based prevention approaches rooted in this
framework seek to assess the levels of risk and protective
factors in individuals or groups and then to select and implement
specific strategies that will effectively reduce elevated
risk factors and/or enhance protective factors. Although research
has identified numerous and interrelated risk factors for
substance use among youth over the past two decades, very
few studies have simultaneously examined comprehensive sets
of putative risk and protective factors with large and nationally
representative samples. The integration of findings from prior
studies has been hampered by differences across these studies
with respect to their target populations and sample sizes,
measures, and other methodological features.
The proposed study seeks to advance our understanding of risk
and protective factors for adolescent substance use by utilizing
a single, nationally representative cross-sectional survey
of the adolescent household population and their parents and
examining a comprehensive set of hypothesized risk and protective
factors across multiple domains. We will utilize the 1999
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) for this purpose.
The large NHSDA sample will enable the investigators to assess
the relationships between risk/protective factors and substance
use for a broad range of substances and stages of substance
use, and to examine how these relationships vary by age, gender,
racial/ethnic group, and other demographic variables. Multivariate
logistic modeling procedures will be applied for these purposes.
Although the cross-sectional nature of the 1999 NHSDA precludes
definitive assessment of temporal ordering of the variables
within the relationships to be investigated, the proposed
study will provide a strong empirical basis on which to establish
the existence, strength, and robustness of the associations
between an expansive set of risk and protective factors and
adolescent substance use behaviors.
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