Specific Aims of Parent Grant and Administrative Supplement This is a request for a health disparities administrative supplement for the currently funded NIDA Letting Go and Staying Connected efficacy trial (R01-DA039247, Laura Hill PI), an interactive parenting handbook intervention to reduce risky behaviors among students transitioning away from home for the first time and into college. The project is in its second year of funding, and Cohort 1 has successfully completed the intervention and first three data collection points with 345 parent-student dyads (90% retention rate). We are now recruiting Cohort 2. Parent Grant: During the transition from home to college, students increase itheir substance use, high-risk HIV/sex-risk behaviors, and associated harms. Prevalence of substance use is high among college students, who represent 40% of our young adult population. Parents remain influential with young adult children, but the mechanisms of risk and protection at this developmental stage in the family domain are not well understood. Our overarching goal is to reduce the incidence of death, injury, sexual assault, and academic failure related to substance use and related risk behaviors among college students. Our immediate objective is to test the efficacy of a preventive intervention for parents as their students transition to college. The project, an interactive parent handbook called Letting Go and Staying Connected, is interactive, theoretically guided, and developmentally targeted. It provides parents with evidence-based parenting skills during a transitional period in which they often seek guidance and support. We are randomly assigning parent-student dyads (450 dyads per cohort; two cohorts) to one of three groups: Handbook, Handbook Plus (an innovative ?booster? condition in which some Handbook parents receive tailored text messages), and Control. All participants will complete a baseline survey during summer before the first year of college. Handbook parents then receive the mailed handbook; Handbook Plus parents also receive booster messages in fall semester. Follow-up surveys will occur once a semester for two years.
Our aims are 1) to test the efficacy of the Handbook: we expect that students of parents receiving the handbook will engage in less substance use and fewer high-risk sex behaviors than control students; 2) to evaluate mediating and moderating factors: our hypothesized model specifies that parent behaviors will mediate associations between Handbook use and student outcomes; and 3) to identify specific attributes of parent-student communication (e.g., content; tone; timing) that predict risk behaviors. The project will allow us to test protective effects of specific aspects of parenting behaviors, and results will extend our limited knowledge about malleable risk and protective factors in the family domain for this developmental period. Administrative Supplement: At Washington State University, 14% of Fall 2017 incoming first- year students were Latinx; of those students, 60% were first-generation college students. However, in our first cohort, Latinx students and parents represented only 8% of the sample and only 21% were first generation students, so our current sample does not represent the students with non-college attending parents. A significant barrier is that many parents of first-generation Latinx student are Spanish-speaking only. reliminary implementation data show also that ethnic minority parents and parents who did participate but did not attend college themselves reported lower rates of engagement with the handbook materials than did other parents. We are requesting the administrative supplement 1) to provide additional resources to adapt, pilot, and test a Spanish-language video version of the handbook; 2) to reduce disparity of access and increase the representation of Spanish-only speaking parents in the sample; and 3) to add an additional specific aim, exploring similarities and differences in communication patterns and family relationships among Latinx and European American parents and young adult children.
Alcohol abuse is the leading cause of death and serious injury among college students, and students also experience significant harms from other types of substance misuse and risk behaviors. The proposed project will test the protective effects of Letting Go and Staying Connected, a handbook for parents of students who are transitioning from home to college. An administrative supplement will enable us to adapt handbook material for first-generation and Spanish-speaking parents. Our approach encourages parent skill development and good management of their student?s new independence, providing a clear framework to guide them in parenting at this stage; we expect that the proposed project will provide college administrators with a new, low-cost, easy-to-implement, evidence-based tool that will signficantly reduce risk behaviors, injuries, sexual assault, and deaths among first-year students.
