This proposal is to extend an existing prospective longitudinal data base designed to study experimentally, through two preventive trials, normal and pathogenic developmental paths, their variation, and their malleability from entrance into elementary school into early adulthood. The data pertain to an epidemiologically defined population of 2311 urban first-graders, now in ninth grade. This proposal is to extend follow-up through their high school period and a year beyond.
The aim i s to study the evolving relationships and etiological processes between the child's psychological well-being and successes and failures in responses to social task demands over time in family, classroom, peer group, employment, and in intimate relationships as these social fields become salient. Their psychological/psychiatric well-being and their adequacy of performance of the social task demands have been assessed periodically since 1985, as have characteristics of social fields and neighborhoods. Two correlated social maladaptive responses to important classroom task demands were each targeted for a preventive intervention in first and second grades in 19 elementary schools in diverse Baltimore neighborhoods. These were poor academic achievement, an antecedent of later depressive and anxious symptoms and disorders, and aggressive/disruptive behavior, an antecedent of later antisocial disorders and drug abuse. Schools, classrooms, teachers, and children were randomly assigned to one of two theory-based preventive interventions or to control classrooms in the same school. There were also children in matched control schools. This application would support: a) modeling developmental paths among control subjects through this extensive period of the life course in the social fields relevant in each stage; b) examining the role of early poor achievement and aggressive responses and the role of early symptom expression in later affective and antisocial disorders; c) continued assessment of the consequences of successfully improving or failing to improve early poor achievement and aggressive/disruptive behaviors on their later specific problem outcomes. Investigators are collaborating from three other developmental epidemiological data bases with similar constructs in different cultural contexts, allowing replication and coordination of analyses. This research should provide major theoretical and practical knowledge regarding the epidemiology, etiology, course, and prevention of affective and antisocial disorders.
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