This application seeks 5 years of support to continue the Family Transitions Project (FTP). Beginning in early adolescence, the study has followed the development of the more than 500 participants each year as they transitioned from adolescence to adulthood. During the next phase of the research, we propose to evaluate how their experiences in their families of origin and procreation, adult romantic relationships, and the broader socioeconomic environment combine with individual differences in personal characteristics to affect risk and resilience for psychiatric disorder as participants enter the fourth decade of life. The FTP includes broad, intensive, multi-informant assessment related to personal characteristics, social relationships, instrumental competence in work and school, and life's traumas and transitions. These intensive assessments have occurred annually or biennially since the inception of the study, creating the type of data set required for a sensitive evaluation of trajectories of risk and resilience over time. Building on this rich archive of information, the specific aims propose to: (1) assess homotypic and heterotypic continuity (i.e., sequential comorbidity) in psychiatric disorder and psychiatric symptoms;(2) identify crucial antecedent risk factors in the development and recurrence of mental disorder;(3) evaluate the degree to which psychiatric problems produce adverse consequences by exacerbating risk factors for mental disorder during the adult years;(4) determine the extent to which psychiatric problems and important risk factors reciprocally interrelate across time in a process of accumulating disadvantage;and (5) evaluate specific, developmental, enhancing personal characteristics, interaction processes in family and adult romantic relationships, and experiences in the broader socioeconomic environment that are predicted to promote resilience by directly reducing adversity or psychiatric symptoms and disorders. Thus, the proposed research is uniquely poised to address important public health questions about the early origins and course of psychiatric disorder from early adolescence to well into the adult years. Especially important, the proposed study will shed new light on how early-onset disorders either become transformed into chronic psychiatric problems across the adult years or involve a temporary perturbation of the transition to adulthood. This information can be used to development more effective preventive interventions designed to reduce lifelong psychiatric problems.
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