? A five-year NIDA Mentored Scientist Career Development Award (K01) is requested to support training and research intended to extend the candidate's previous work in violence exposure and coping in adolescents to the drug abuse and physiological stress responses to violence. In the long term, the candidate wishes to understand linkages between community violence exposure, physiological stress responses, and drug abuse, with attention to gender differences and familial contributions, using state of the art measures of stress response and state of the art statistical models. Formal training will be provided by bi-monthly meetings with the candidate's mentors, Drs. Dace Svikis and Albert Farrell, and by regular consultation with the three external consultants, Drs. Ken Winters, Howard Moss, and Gary Wand. In addition, she will attend two statistical courses offered by the Center for Statistical Consultation at the University of Michigan, one course in longitudinal analyses offered by the University of Virginia, and a training course in using biological markers in research offered by The Pennsylvania State University. The candidate's research is intended to answer a series of questions about associations between community violence exposure, stress responses produced by the Hypothalamus- Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis, and drug use initiation and abuse through analysis of existing data and collection of new data. A community-based, longitudinal, prospective study that incorporates face-toface interviews and laboratory-based physiological assessments will be undertaken to achieve this aim. Two hundred fifty male and female early (10-11 yrs) and middle (14-15 yrs) adolescents from high violence areas in the Richmond, VA metropolitan area will be recruited. A variety of statistical methods and multivariate structural modeling techniques will be used to estimate relations between violence exposure, physiological stress responses, and drug use and abuse, and to examine whether these associations are moderated by gender or familial factors. ? ? ? ?
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