(Revised ) This present application requests 5 years of support to collect a 3rd wave of data on a bi-racial (Black, White) random sample of young adults who were initially interviewed 10 years ago when they were 13-19 yrs old, and 2 additional waves from a critical subsample. More than 2000 adolescents participated at Time 1 (Tl; 81 percent of eligibles), and 1814 (88 percent) of these were re-interviewed at T2 about 5 yrs later. At T3, we anticipate re-interviewing 1710 of these respondents, or 83 percent of the T1 sample. From those T3 respondents less than or equal to 25 yrs, we plan to re-interview a subsample of about 600 on 2 subsequent occasions, at yearly intervals. To date, this research has focused on explicating the multiple processes that underlie and account for the relationship between alcohol use and risky behavior. Analyses of T1 and T2 data provide evidence to support both causal and non-causal links between drinking and behavior and suggest that these multiple relationships are complex and likely circumscribed by important boundary conditions (Dermen et al., 1998; Dermen and Cooper, 1998). Given the wealth of data available from the 1st 2 waves, the significance of findings to date, the excellent overall sample retention rate, and the unique opportunity to examine complex inter-relations between alcohol use and risky behavior in a new and important developmental period in a high-risk, bi-racial sample, we propose to conduct a 5-yr follow-up of this cohort (as well as 6- and 7-yr follow-ups of a subsample) to address the following aims: (1) to examine ways in which intraindividual and dyadic relationship factors mediate and/or moderate the acute effects of drinking in specific social situations on risky behavior; (2) to develop a broader and more complete understanding of ways in which chronic patterns of alcohol use and of risky behavior influence one another over time; (3) to examine the roles of behavioral undercontrol and the experience, expression, and regulation of affect as underlying common causes of problematic alcohol use and risky behavior; (4) to describe normative patterns of change in alcohol use and risky behavior from adolescence into young adulthood, and to identify factors that influence these patterns; and (5) to systematically explore gender, race, and age differences in the above processes. In addition to re-interviewing the main cohort of respondents, we propose to interview partners of respondents (by phone), and to collect several sources of objective, non-self-report data. The heterogeneity of proposed methods, measures, and analytic techniques, the long longitudinal/prospective nature of our data, and the ability to examine generalizability of key findings across gender, race, and age, together provide a rich and methodologically rigorous framework for examining the complex interplay of drinking and risky behavior. The proposed study promises to yield results of substantial scientific, theoretical, and pragmatic import.
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