An unacceptably large number of adolescents engage in substance use practices that compromise their health and subsequent life success. A promising approach to more fully understanding adolescent drug involvement is a """"""""contextual"""""""" approach that focuses on the role of the spatial social contexts of communities neighborhoods and schools in which adolescents are embedded. However, strong empirical evidence of l existence and nature of contextual effects is still lacking. The purpose of the proposed stud is to further examine the linkages between extra familial context and an adolescent's risk of drug involvement. The relatively small- body of previous research devoted to this topic has been rather unsuccessful establishing these linkages by failing to account for the multi-dimensionality of contextual influences, by not fully examining how family and individual characteristics condition these contextual influences, and by lacking sufficient data sources. Our study is designed to overcome each of these obstacles. In particular, we apply t theoretical framework developed by Jencks and Mayer (1990) is applied in which five key dimensions/mechanisms extra-familial context are posited to affect an individual's behavior. Adopting this framework, we will define multiple-indicator measures of each of these underlying contextual dimensions that are theoretically relevant an adolescent's alcohol and other drug use and examine their effects on each of five aspects of this behavior. They will also examine the extent to which an adolescent's gender, race/ethnicity, family structure and process and parental modeling of substance use behavior affect her or his susceptibility to the effects of the contextual dimensions on each alcohol and drug use outcome defined in our study. We will estimate fixed-effects models to control for the potential bias of unmeasured factors, as well cross-sectional models. The study will be based on data from the Add Health survey, a unique data set that contains information on all relevant community, neighborhood, school and family contexts for a nationally representative sample of adolescents. By applying the Jencks and Mayer framework and using this unique data set, the ultimate goal of the proposed study is to provide a theoretically driven and policy relevant explanation of how context influences an adolescent's drug involvement.
