Secondary data analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 (hereafter referred to as NLSY97) are proposed to address several research questions related to the cross-temporal relationships between features of parenting (including parental style, monitoring, and support), and trajectories of substance use (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana) and delinquency with a national sample of early adolescents in transition to middle adolescence. A cohort-sequential design will be used to capture patterns of change in substance use and delinquency across four annual waves of measurement spanning 1997-2000 for youth 11-14 years of age in 1997. This cohort-sequential, or accelerated longitudinal, design will facilitate the modeling of trajectors of substance use and delinquency from ages 11-17. The subsample focused on in this proposal will include 4,095 children who were ages 11-14 in 1997 and includes an oversampling of black (24%, n=986) and Hispanic (21%, n=863) youth. The NLSY97 contains a larger number of older adolescents (ages 15 and above in 1997), but by design many of the parenting measures of substantive interest to the goals of this proposal were not consistently administered across time and hence were not selected for inclusion in this application. The goals of the proposal are: (1) to evaluate the influence of parenting dimensions on the growth of delinquency and substance use in early adolescence to determine if these influences are similar across ethnic and gender groups; (2) to examine bidirectional relationships between delinquency and substance use across time using both cross-lagged latent variable analyses and dual latent growth modeling; and (3) to conduct latent growth mixture modeling with delinquency and substance use variables to identify heterogeneous trajectories and to identify their common and unique predictors. Other significant predictors to be included in the specified statistical models enumerated above will include a broad range of SES variables, peer deviance, and early exposure to witnessing violence.
