This application describes a plan to continue studying the antecedents and consequences of alcohol and other drug use (AOD) among respondents from the original study through the middle adult transition period. We use stress-coping, and social influence and integration conceptual models to guide our study. We also apply life-span and resiliency perpspectives to inform our longitudinal analyses and identify assets and resources in youth's lives. We propose to collect four more years of data in order to have a longitudinal data set that follows youth from their first year in high school to their late twenties (i.e., middle adult transitional period). Our longitudinal sample includes 570 urban respondents approximately 81% African American and 55% female. We have found that respondents'transition to adult roles after high school has only started to take place by the conclusion of our original 8 years of data collection. We plan to measure many of the same variables we have collected- psychological well-being, social support and influence, community participation, racial identity, child bearing, marriage and intimate relationships, employment-and add several new measures to provide more in-depth information about parenting, employment qualities, and neighborhood context. We will analyze adolescent AOD use and its effect on young adult AOD and adult roles including quality of intimate relationships, parenting, and employment qualities. We also will study the effects of adult roles on AOD during the middle transition period. We employ growth curve modeling (e.g., HLM), growth mixture modeling, and structural equation modeling to test several hypotheses regarding the effects of adolescent AOD and other risk factors on young adult AOD and transitional tasks, the association between transitional tasks and young adult AOD, and the effects of promotive factors to counteract or protect against risks for AOD.
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