Alcohol use disorders (AUD) are very common among Pacific Islander (PI) young adults, placing them at great risk for serious harm. In having many AUD problems, PI young adults are similar to other young adults from indigenous US populations such as American Indians and Alaskan Natives, with whom they share legacies of historical trauma and negative US colonization. Yet, AUDs in these vulnerable PIs have received little research attention, and for this reason, remain poorly understood. The proposed study will seek to increase our understanding of the risks associated with AUDs among PI young adults so that we may design effective strategies to prevent them. This study will conduct focus groups and citizens? panels?an innovative research approach that is highly congruent with PI cultural decision-making practices?with young adults at risk of, or with AUDs, and informal community providers in two large PI communities: Samoans in Los Angeles County and Marshallese in Arkansas. The specific goals of these groups and panels is to obtain information about the risk and protective factors for PI young adult AUDs, and their preferred prevention strategies. In the citizens? panels, PI community participants will gather, receive information about potential AUD prevention strategies (from existing evidence- based interventions) to reduce AUD risks in PI young adults, and discuss and choose as a group the strategies they believe will be most likely to prevent PI young adult AUDs. Samoan and Marshallese interpreters will be present for the panels and all materials will be provided in English, Samoan, and Marshallese. Data from this study will be analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory approach to draw important patterns from the data while keeping in mind important PI cultural frameworks and constructs from the existing AUD literature. The Research Team and an advisory council of community experts will pair this analyzed community data with the most current AUD prevention literature in order to tailor existing evidence-based AUD prevention strategies to PI young adults. This model will lay the groundwork for developing and implementing effective, culturally tailored, and community-accepted AUD prevention interventions for PI young adults in future studies. The findings from this study will be presented back to the target PI communities through community forums, and disseminated to the scientific community through academic manuscripts.
Alcohol use disorders are a major problem for Pacific Islanders young adults between 18-30 years, who commonly engage in high-risk drinking that puts them at increased risk for harm; but little is known about why these Pacific Islanders develop alcohol use disorders or what can be done to prevent them. This community- based study will recruit lay Pacific Islander young adults and informal community providers to participate in focus groups and citizens? panels, in order to obtain their cultural perspectives on alcohol use, and risk and protective factors for alcohol use disorders. These Pacific Islander community participants will also make decisions together about possible strategies to prevent alcohol use disorders in Pacific Islander young adults, which we will use to develop the first conceptual model of culturally tailored alcohol use disorder prevention strategies for Pacific Islander young adults. !
