The lack of knowledge regarding adolescent mental health problems, particularly among poor and/or minority youth, is an acute problem for developmental theory, intervention and social policy. Beyond the at-risk status accorded from being poor and/or an ethnic minority, the biological, psychological and ecological flux characterizing adolescence places such youth at even greater risk. Rates of antisocial behavior and substance abuse, academic failure, and suicide attempts, as well as less dramatic problems, reach their peak during middle adolescence. Testing a developmental mediated or moderated risk model, where the influence of risk/protective bases on developmental outcomes is mediated by both personological and ecological factors, the Adolescent Pathways Project has gathered three data points from more than 1000 ethnically diverse, poor urban adolescents to address this knowledge gap. These three point span either the elementary/junior high or junior/senior high school transition. In addition, over 250 parents have been interviewed and 1980 census-tract data have been obtained to complement the youth-reported information. This proposed continuation project has specific aims. First, the collection of a fourth and fifth data points--also spanning a second school transition for the younger group--will allow us to plot complex trajectories of developmental outcomes, using latent growth curve modelling, to identify those key causal processes that shape or influence individual differences in changes in adaptation and maladaptation, using structural equation modelling. Second, data will be gathered to explore in greater detail the role played by youths' daily involvement in family, peer, school and neighborhood microsystem relationships, through both self- report and ecologically-derived data. An in depth interviews of a subset of youth using time diary methods, a second data wave of parent data and the 1990 census-tract data on neighborhoods, will be used to examine the changing ecological context within which the developmental trajectories are occurring.
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