This project will provide detailed data on alcohol and drug use and associated risk factors among rural youth. Surveys will be administered to 7th-12th grade students in a national sample of rural schools stratified by region and rurality (county population and distance from a metropolitan center) with a comparison sample of non-rural schools. Schools that are African-American and Mexican-American will be oversampled. (Comparable data on drug use of American Indian youth, the other major rural ethnic minority group, will be available from another project.) The study will also obtain data on violence, victimization, high risk drug use behaviors, and delinquency and their relationship to drug use. The study will use structural equation modeling to examine how individual risk factors relate to drug use and delinquency of rural youth and determine whether there are differences in those relationships by age, gender, ethnicity, and rurality. Individual risk factors include socialization characteristics such as family relationships, parental monitoring, school adjustment and peer influences, personal characteristics such as excitement/risk seeking, anger, emotional distress, tolerance of deviance and social alienation, and cultural identification. The study will use hierarchical linear modeling to determine how differences in drug use rates across schools are related to different levels of personal and social risk factors among students in those schools and to community and school characteristics including school structure, school normlessness, poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, ascriptive inequality, community industrial structure, age structure, population mobility, and family disorganization, and whether these relationships differ by rurality.
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