Current research suggests that a relationship exists between alcohol use and child maltreatment. To date, however, a dearth of information exists on how much of maltreatment occurs when a parent has been drinking or how local alcohol environments, including how where a parent spends their time exposes him or her to various drinking locations and contexts. In this application we build upon and extend that work in three important ways: (1) The proposed study assesses maladaptive parenting and related alcohol use during discipline events, allowing us to make statements about the incidence of alcohol-related harsh and neglectful parenting practices;(2) This prospective study uses individuals own activity spaces to understand how drinking locations and contexts may affect these relationships over time;and (3) building upon our findings related to drinking locations, this study will explicitly examine parents'use of their local alcohol environments, including how social relationships may exacerbate or hinder drinking behaviors that are related to maladaptive parenting. Sixty semi-structured ethnographic interviews will allow us to assess and determine the range of parent activity and related drinking spaces, drinking contexts, and social supports to enable to development of survey questions on these topics. Two waves (Years 2 and 4) of multi-modal (telephone and web) survey data collection with 2,100 parents of children (birth to 10 years) sampled throughout 30 communities across the state of California will provide information about maladaptive parenting, alcohol use, activity spaces, and drinking locations and contexts that will address the following specific aims: (1) Investigate whether or not parents are more likely to use abusive or neglectful parenting techniques immediately before, during and after parenting discipline events compared to when no drinking has occurred; (2) Determine if the size and use of activity spaces by parents moderates the relationship between density of alcohol outlets, use of drinking venues and maladaptive parenting;and how changes in activity spaces affect use of outlets and drinking venues controlling for other known correlates of maladaptive parenting;and (3) Examine how characteristics of social support networks (location to parent, drinking behavior, frequency of contact) moderate drinking behaviors and exposure to alcohol environments to affect maladaptive parenting.
The short term goal of the study is to determine where, when, and with whom a person drinks in order to design secondary prevention programs and messages aimed at reducing maltreatment due to alcohol use so findings can be tailored to environmentally-based prevention activities at locations where populations at highrisk for using maladaptive parenting practices may spend time and among groups of individuals who may support maladaptive parenting. The long-term goal of this project is to develop policies and prevention programs that will reduce problems related to drinking activity spaces.
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