Longitudinal studies of children of alcoholics (COAs) have informed etiological theories about the development and course of substance disorders and documented COAs' pervasive risk for a variety of negative outcomes including substance disorders (Sher, 1991; West & Prinz, 1987). One potentially key mechanism explaining COAs' pervasive risk profile and individual variation in the course of substance outcomes is stress. We propose a developmental model of stress and substance outcomes that emphasizes the importance of time and timing in how stress impacts the life-course of COAs as well as the onset, escalation and deceleration of substance behaviors. Our method is a secondary analysis of COAs' early lifecourse which combines data from three, existing, methodologically rigorous studies initiated in childhood (Zucker & Fitzgerald, 1991), adolescence (Chassin, Rogosch & Barrera, 1991) and young adulthood (Sher, 1991). Despite the significant contributions of each study, differences among them in methodology, measurement and key questions of interest have not always facilitated comparison of results and substantive inferences about the life-course trajectories of COAs from early childhood into adulthood. Our proposal overcomes this issue through the pursuit of five aims: (1) to evaluate whether stress and the timing of stress events mediate the relation between parent alcoholism and individual variation in risk behaviors for substance outcomes over time, (2) to test whether five distinct mechanisms posited to underlie relation among stress, risk behaviors and substance outcomes are differentially salient across development among COAs and non-COAs, (3) to evaluate important moderators that either mitigate or exacerbate risk for substance outcomes related to the occurrence and timing of stress and risk behaviors in COAs and non-COAs, (4) to evaluate whether heterogeneity of risk exists within COAs due to comorbid disorders in alcoholic parents, gender of children and impaired parents, and patterns of drinking in alcoholic parents, and (5) to extend and disseminate existing longitudinal analyses that incorporate participants from multiple studies within a single analytic framework.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
1R01DA015398-01
Application #
6507685
Study Section
Risk, Prevention and Health Behavior Integrated Review Group (RPHB)
Program Officer
Chambers, Jessica Campbell
Project Start
2002-08-15
Project End
2006-04-30
Budget Start
2002-08-15
Budget End
2003-04-30
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2002
Total Cost
$320,362
Indirect Cost
Name
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
078861598
City
Chapel Hill
State
NC
Country
United States
Zip Code
27599
Burns, Alison R; Hussong, Andrea M; Solis, Jessica M et al. (2017) Examining Cohort Effects in Developmental Trajectories of Substance Use. Int J Behav Dev 41:621-631
McGinley, James S; Curran, Patrick J; Hedeker, Donald (2015) A novel modeling framework for ordinal data defined by collapsed counts. Stat Med 34:2312-24
Bainter, Sierra A; Curran, Patrick J (2015) Advantages of Integrative Data Analysis for Developmental Research. J Cogn Dev 16:1-10
Curran, Patrick J (2014) Commentary: The critical role of measurement (and space elevators) in the study of child development. J Pediatr Psychol 39:258-61
Curran, Patrick J; Howard, Andrea L; Bainter, Sierra A et al. (2014) The separation of between-person and within-person components of individual change over time: a latent curve model with structured residuals. J Consult Clin Psychol 82:879-94
Curran, Patrick J; McGinley, James S; Bauer, Daniel J et al. (2014) A Moderated Nonlinear Factor Model for the Development of Commensurate Measures in Integrative Data Analysis. Multivariate Behav Res 49:214-231
McGinley, James S; Curran, Patrick J (2014) Validity Concerns with Multiplying Ordinal Items Defined by Binned Counts: An Application to a Quantity-Frequency Measure of Alcohol Use. Methodology (Gott) 10:108-116
Hussong, Andrea M; Burns, Alison R; Solis, Jessica M et al. (2013) Future directions in the developmental science of addictions. J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol 42:863-73
Bauer, Daniel J; Howard, Andrea L; Baldasaro, Ruth E et al. (2013) A trifactor model for integrating ratings across multiple informants. Psychol Methods 18:475-93
Hussong, Andrea M; Curran, Patrick J; Bauer, Daniel J (2013) Integrative data analysis in clinical psychology research. Annu Rev Clin Psychol 9:61-89

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