Efforts to educate young persons about the impact that their behavior can have on their physical and mental health have increased dramatically in the last 10 - 15 years. These efforts have been effective at enhancing adolescents' awareness of these risks, but they have been much less successful at actually altering (reducing) risk behaviors, such as smoking, drinking and unprotected sex. Research programs conducted over the last five years, one by the PI and Co-PI (Gerrard), the other by Co- PI Wills have both attempted to examine and explain this paradox between adolescents' health awareness and their health actions. The specific purpose of the proposed project is to extend the previous research of Gibbons and Gerrard, and also to combine it with that of Wills. This will be done in an effort to provide a better understanding of health risks among all adolescents, but especially among a specific population of children who, although at very high risk for both physical and mental health problems, have been largely neglected by previous health researchers, namely lower SES White and African-American children living in rural communities. The proposed research is based on the same theoretical structure that has guided our previous work. This social-psychological approach shares a number of elements with other health models (e.g., importance of perceived norms, dispositions, and intentions), but also contains some social and cognitive elements that distinguish it from other models. Those elements include an emphasis on the """"""""opportunistic"""""""" (unplanned) and very social nature of adolescent behavior -- especially risk behavior - as well as the importance of cognitive structures (e.g., the social images associated with the behaviors) and family dynamics in promoting and inhibiting these behaviors. It is our contention that these elements and emphases in the model make it particularly appropriate for the study of adolescent risk behavior among these populations of at-risk children. The proposed research will extend and improve the model and these research programs in the following ways: a) by including younger children-- before they have begun engaging in the behaviors; b) by providing an opportunity to compare the risk precipitating and promoting factors of White and African-American children, and c) by examining the interactive effects, over time, of environmental, social and psychological factors that lead to behavior problems and resilience to such problems.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 112 publications
