In this application, we request 5 years of additional funding to follow adolescents and their families who participated in a randomized trial of a family-centered preventive intervention for rural African American youths. The Strong African American Families Program (SAAF) is a universal intervention designed to deter alcohol use in the targeted population. The trial includes 669 families with a child who was 11 years old at recruitment and who will be 15 years old when data collection for the proposed research is scheduled to begin. The continuation will allow us to follow the SAAF families across the challenging developmental transitions the youths will encounter as they progress through adolescence. The study's experimental design, in which some families participate in the program and others form a control group, provides a rare opportunity to determine whether SAAF will continue to protect the youths from the use of alcohol and other substances throughout high school. The families who participated in the SAAF research program are representative of rural Georgia communities, in which poverty and unemployment rates are among the highest in the nation (Proctor & Dalaker, 2003). Nevertheless, we have retained 93% of the sample by working closely with community leaders in the areas in which the participants reside. At posttest and long-term follow-up assessments that were administered 3 months and 24 month post-intervention, respectively, fewer SAAF youths than control youths had initiated alcohol use. SAAF youths who did initiate alcohol use increased their use more slowly, compared with controls, from a pre-intervention assessment to the long-term follow-up. We propose to extend our programmatic research by collecting three additional waves of data. This will enable us not only to continue our longitudinal study but also to examine the mediational family, peer, and intrapersonal processes through which SAAF is hypothesized to confer its effects. As in the original research, a multi-informant design that includes reports from adolescents, their friends, their primary caregivers, and their teachers will be used to collect the additional data.
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