Risk-Taking behaviors (e.g., unsafe sexual behaviors, polysubstance use) among adolescents continue to occur at high rates despite advances in the public health area. Nomothetic prevention programs targeted at risk behaviors have had limited success, suggesting the need for more idiographic-oriented prevention programs. Whereas implementation of such programs is somewhat limited due to high health care costs, these costs could be reduced considerably if interventions could be focused on adolescents with the inclination to engage in risk behaviors before they have begun to engage in such behaviors. The primary focus of this experiment is to evaluate a behavioral method that may ultimately be more useful than self-report measures for identifying adolescents most in need of risk behavior prevention programs. Specifically, self-report measures of risk-related constructs and the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) will be administered to a sample of 128 high school-aged African American adolescents to predict self-reported engagement in real-world risk-taking behaviors. Following from this study, we will begin work on a prospective study aimed at identifying individuals with a propensity for risk taking prior to actual engagement in such behaviors.
| Bornovalova, Marina A; Gwadz, Marya A; Kahler, Christopher et al. (2008) Sensation seeking and risk-taking propensity as mediators in the relationship between childhood abuse and HIV-related risk behavior. Child Abuse Negl 32:99-109 |
