In this proposal, we request funding to design and evaluate a multi-component prevention program to deter substance use among African American emerging adults in rural Georgia. The intervention's delivery is modeled after Brody and Murry's Strong African American Families Program (SAAF), a preventive intervention for rural adolescents. Prevention programming will include a series of weekly meetings that include separate targeted sessions for emerging adults and for their parents and adult extended family members. Meetings also include sessions in which all family members interact with each other to apply the skills that they learned in their separate sessions. The sample will consist of 700 families that include a high school senior, half of whom will be assigned randomly to the prevention program and half of whom will be assigned to a control group. Pre-intervention, post-intervention, and follow-up assessments of emerging adults' substance use will be conducted with the entire sample. We plan to follow the high-school seniors and their families as they enter emerging adulthood. Many rural African American emerging adults live with chronic environmental stress that takes a toll on them, increasing their likelihood of substance use as they make the transition to emerging adulthood. During this transition, African Americans surpass European Americans in substance use rates (Biafora & Zimmerman, 1998; Office of Applied Statistics, 2003). This divergence of substance use trends has been termed the """"""""racial crossover effect."""""""" These data suggest that the protective power that enables African American families to help adolescents avoid substance use wanes as youths become emerging adults and leave their parents' homes (Wallace, 1999). Prevention scientists face the challenge of harnessing African American families' protective capacities so that they continue to deter substance use after youths establish independent residences. Systematic investigations of emerging adults and their families in rural America are rare; even rarer are empirically validated prevention programs for rural African American emerging adults. The proposed research and prevention program is designed to fill this need.
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