The families who will participate in the proposed research program live in small towns and communities in rural Georgia, in which poverty rates are among the highest in the nation and unemployment rates are above the national average. Many African American families in rural Georgia thus live with chronic economic and contextual stress that can take a toll on adolescents. Recent epidemiologic data indicate that African American youth in rural areas use substances and engage in high-risk sexual activity at rates equal to or exceeding those of youth living in densely populated inner cities. These high-risk behaviors forecast HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, adolescent parenthood, school dropout, involvement with the criminal justice system, and substance use during adulthood. Currently, no developmental and culturally appropriate prevention programs have been developed to deter substance use and high-risk sexual behavior among the several million African American adolescents who live in the rural South. To address this public health need, Drs. Brody and Murry from the University of Georgia and Drs. DiClemente and Wingood from Emory University designed and developed the Strong African American Families-High School program (SAAF-HS). In this application, funding is requested for evaluating this multicomponent, family-centered prevention program. The intervention's delivery is modeled after Brody and Murry's Strong African American Families Program (SAAF), an efficacious preventive intervention for rural African American preadolescents. The program consists of seven weekly meetings that include separate sessions for adolescents and their parents, followed by family sessions in which youth and parents interact with each other to apply the skills they learned in their separate sessions. The sample will consist of 572 families with a 10th-grade student, half of whom will be assigned randomly to the SAAF-HS program and half of whom will be assigned to an attention-control group. Pre-intervention, post-intervention, and long-term follow-up assessments of adolescents'substance use and high risk sexual behavior will be gathered from the entire sample.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DA021736-05
Application #
7847440
Study Section
Community-Level Health Promotion Study Section (CLHP)
Program Officer
Crump, Aria
Project Start
2006-09-30
Project End
2012-05-31
Budget Start
2010-06-01
Budget End
2012-05-31
Support Year
5
Fiscal Year
2010
Total Cost
$674,587
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Georgia
Department
Psychology
Type
Organized Research Units
DUNS #
004315578
City
Athens
State
GA
Country
United States
Zip Code
30602
Cho, Junhan; Kogan, Steven M (2016) Parent and youth dopamine D4 receptor genotypes moderate multilevel contextual effects on rural African American youth's risk behavior. Dev Psychopathol 28:433-45
Kogan, Steven M; Yu, Tianyi; Allen, Kimberly A et al. (2015) Racial microstressors, racial self-concept, and depressive symptoms among male African Americans during the transition to adulthood. J Youth Adolesc 44:898-909
Brody, Gene H; Chen, Yi-Fu; Beach, Steven R H et al. (2014) Differential sensitivity to prevention programming: a dopaminergic polymorphism-enhanced prevention effect on protective parenting and adolescent substance use. Health Psychol 33:182-91
Brody, Gene H; Beach, Steven R H; Hill, Karl G et al. (2013) Using genetically informed, randomized prevention trials to test etiological hypotheses about child and adolescent drug use and psychopathology. Am J Public Health 103 Suppl 1:S19-24
Brody, Gene H; Chen, Yi-fu; Beach, Steven R H (2013) Differential susceptibility to prevention: GABAergic, dopaminergic, and multilocus effects. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 54:863-71
Kogan, Steven M; Brody, Gene H; Molgaard, Virginia K et al. (2012) The strong African American families-teen trial: rationale, design, engagement processes, and family-specific effects. Prev Sci 13:206-17
Brody, Gene H; Chen, Yi-fu; Kogan, Steven M et al. (2012) Family-centered program deters substance use, conduct problems, and depressive symptoms in black adolescents. Pediatrics 129:108-15
Kogan, Steven M; Yu, Tianyi; Brody, Gene H et al. (2012) Integrating condom skills into family-centered prevention: efficacy of the Strong African American Families-Teen program. J Adolesc Health 51:164-70
Beach, Steven R H; Brody, Gene H; Todorov, Alexandre A et al. (2010) Methylation at SLC6A4 is linked to family history of child abuse: an examination of the Iowa Adoptee sample. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 153B:710-713
Howe, George W; Beach, Steven R H; Brody, Gene H (2010) Microtrial methods for translating gene-environment dynamics into preventive interventions. Prev Sci 11:343-54

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