Prospective longitudinal studies designed to test theoretical models of change in level of involvement, and personal and social consequences of patterns of illicit drug use, other substance abuse, and other deviant adaptations to life stress. Other deviant adaptations include violence, self-destructive behaviors, psychiatric disorders, and a range of criminal activities. The analyses seek to test and refine theoretically informed multivariate models. The variables that comprise the models include social identities, interpersonal role strain, self- attitudes, personal values, coping patterns and life events as well as involvement in deviant patterns and their consequences that influence other deviant processes. Personal and social consequences include subjective distress, satisfaction with interpersonal role behavior, familial status, health status, labor force participation, self-attitudes, and role performance in a variety of roles. Data on deviant adaptations and their consequences, intervening life events, and other theoretically relevant variables were collected by household interviews with 6100 subjects from a cohort of 9300 young adults who were first studied by up to three annually administered questionnaires during their junior high school years. The cohort represents a 50 per cent sample of the 1971 seventh graders in the Houston school district. Secondary sources of data on outcomes were obtained from records of public agencies. The analyses will specify explanatory frameworks that are relevant to the range of deviant patterns and that are specific to the processes underlying specific patterns of substance abuse or other deviant responses. Analyses involve linear and non-linear regression, multiple logistic function analysis, and structural model estimates in LISREL. Analyses will be facilitated by continued training in newly developing multivariate strategies, collaboration with research teams from other panel studies, and will constitute the basis for the design of a second generation study (children of the present cohort), new waves of data collection, and studies of minorities and other high- risk groups.
