ALTERING FAMILY NORMS AND ADOLESCENT ALCOHOL MISUSE

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The goals of the proposed project are to conduct a longitudinal study to determine the effects of a family-based intervention directed at altering parental norms and behavior regarding adolescent alcohol use/misuse. The specific aims are to: test cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, the predictive validity of a conceptual model of parental norm-setting, behavior, attitudes; and family demographic, child intrapersonal and peer group influences on child alcohol use/misuse behavior; implement and evaluate the efficacy of an intervention directed at changing parents information, attitudes, norm-setting behavior regarding alcohol use/misuse by their school-aged children, monitoring, permissiveness, involvement, and nurturance; assess, in a controlled longitudinal study, the effectiveness of the parent-directed intervention in changing: parents' information and, attitudes regarding the consequences of adolescent alcohol use/misuse and prevention concepts; parents permissiveness, involvement with their child, norm-setting regarding their child's alcohol use/misuse, and monitoring of their child's activities; the child's perceptions of parental norms regarding alcohol use/misuse, parental involvement, and parental monitoring; the child's self-esteem and susceptibility to peer pressure; the child's perception of peer norms regarding alcohol use/misuse, and the child's alcohol use/misuse intentions and behavior; assess the effects of the intervention on parents' behavior separately for fathers and mothers; assess the mediating effects of any changes in the parents behavior on changes in the children's alcohol use/misuse separately for boys and girls; and provide, at a minimum, preliminary evidence concerning the comparability of the measurement and structural models and relative efficacy of the intervention for African-American, as well as Caucasian, families. Subjects will be about 3000 students in the fifth grade and 1000 in the seventh grade in year one, and their parents. All students and parents will complete interviews prior to the intervention and be posttested every year thereafter. One-half of the Caucasian and one-half of the African- American fifth grade families will be randomly assigned to each of two conditions: treatment and control. The seventh grade students and their families who were subjects in a pilot study, in which the intervention was developed and tested, will be included in the sample, with 216 families in a treatment group and the remaining 534 families in a control group. Each of the fifth grade and seventh grade booster treatment condition families will receive three intervention visits. The fifth grade treatment condition families will receive three booster intervention visits during year three. The data analyses will consist of repeated measures analysis of variance and iterative testing of covariance structure models of parental practices and adolescent alcohol use/misuse.