This proposed study is the continuation of a prospective five-year longitudinal study of offspring in families with substance-abusing parents, depressed parents, and parents without a diagnosable psychiatric disorder in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. The study collected annual data from parents and offspring since 1992, following sample recruitment and classification. The first funding cycle of this study concluded March 31, 1996, with a 97.3 % follow-up rate. We propose a continuation study using a four-wave prospective cohort design that follows the adolescents who participated in the first cycle but who will be 14 to 21 years of age in 1997. This proposed study has as its overall goal to develop and test models that assess the effects of parental substance abuse and depression, adolescent substance use and depression, and the mediating effects of personal resources, familial and extrafamilial factors on the trajectories, transitions, and turning points that define the movement from late adolescence to young adulthood. And by integrating these follow-up data with data from the first cycle, the study will examine developmental trajectories involving parental psychopathology, drug use, deviant behavior, and mental health among offspring from late childhood through the stages of adolescence into young adulthood . Self administered questionnaires will be completed by all adolescents (N=848 in 585 families) at approximately 12-month intervals during the first four years of the study, and by all parents (N=881 parents) during the first three years of the study. In addition, structured psychiatric interviews using UM-CIDI will be conducted with adolescents in Years 2 and 4, and with parents using the substance use disorder and mood disorders modules in Year 2. These diagnostic data, along with annual self-administered questionnaires filled out by parents and adolescents that cover a wide range of topics (family and parent-child relations, experiences, and changes; peer behaviors and relations; life events and transitions, such as school and work experiences; drug and alcohol use, and criminal behavior; social support; coping mechanisms such as self-esteem and mastery; and depressive symptomatology) will provide abundant information with which to assess numerous life transitions--especially role transitions that accompany the movement to young adulthood--and adaptations, behavioral problems such as drug use or alcohol abuse, and psychiatric disorders in late adolescence and young adulthood.
