Due to the widespread prevalence of alcohol use among America's youth and the association of alcohol abuse with family problems, school dropout, and teen mortality, adolescent alcohol abuse presents a major health threat in every socioeconomic group and ethnic culture in society today. While the literature on adolescent alcohol use stresses the importance of the family, and family treatment models are abundant, research addressing the actual patterns of interaction in families with alcohol-abusing youth have been rare. The proposed project systematically focuses on the identification of family interaction patterns of alcohol-abusing adolescents. It offers a critical new dimension to adolescent alcohol and family interaction research by examining family interactions across cultures.
The specific aims of the project will be accomplished by examining the families of problem-drinking adolescents in Anglo American and Mexican American cultures. Families with problem-drinking adolescents will be compared with families of non-disturbed adolescents and families of adolescents having other (non-drinking) psychiatric disturbance. The study will involve 100 families of alcohol-abusing adolescents, 100 families with nonalcohol-abusing, disturbed adolescents, and 100 families with non-disturbed adolescents. Half of each group will consist of Mexican American families and half Anglo families. All families will engage in a family interaction task which will be videotaped for later coding and analysis. Measures of communication defensiveness and dominance will be coded and analyzed as dependent variables using a factorial MANOVA design. In addition, a cross-classified event sequential analysis will be performed to examine specific exchanges of communication behavior for fathers, mothers, and adolescents. The project aims to produce definitive data in: 1) identifying communication interaction patterns which distinguish families with drinking versus families with nondrinking adolescents, and 2) how adolescent alcohol abuse is reflected in family interactions across Anglo American and Mexican American cultures. Moreover, the project aims to provide an empirical and theoretical basis for the treatment of adolescent alcohol problems.
| Brody, J L; Waldron, H B (2000) Ethical issues in research on the treatment of adolescent substance abuse disorders. Addict Behav 25:217-28 |
