This prospective longitudinal survey study will test and appropriately reformulate theoretical models representing mutually interacting, psychosocial influences upon the adoption, maintenance, reduction, escalation, and discontinuance of drug abuse patterns as well as each of a broad range of other deviant adaptations to life events between early adolescence and young adulthood. """"""""Other deviant adaptations"""""""" include modes of functional psychiatric disorders, interpersonal violence, alcohol abuse, suicidal behavior, """"""""prosocial acting out,"""""""" stealing, and vandalism as well as independently determined indices of self-rejection and correlated subjective distress. The models will consider common influences upon drug abuse and other modes of deviance as well as influences that are """"""""unique"""""""" to the explanation of drug abuse patterns and other deviant responses considered individually. Data on the mutually interacting variables said to influence deviant adaptations (including coping/defensive patterns, personal values, social positions, life events, and specified early deviant adaptations as these influence other deviant outcomes at a later date) were collected in the course of an earlier longitudinal study of 9,335 7th graders who responded to a questionnaire in 1971, 1972 and 1973. Data on intervening and current deviant adaptations and their consequences, intervening life events, and other theoretically relevant variables will be collected by follow-up semi-structured household interviews with the same subjects first interviewed in their early adolescence. The follow-up interviews will be completed over a three-year period when the subjects will be young adults (generally 22 and 26). The mathematical analysis will entail structural equation models (and their functional equivalent for qualitative variables).
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