National Study of Risk Factors for Adolescent Drug Use

近年来，了解和预防青少年药物使用和其他健康危险行为的战略越来越多地纳入风险和保护因素框架。以这一框架为基础的流行病学预防方法需要评估个人或群体的风险和保护因素的水平，然后选择和实施具体的战略，以有效地减少高风险因素和/或加强保护因素。尽管在过去二十年中，研究已经确定了青年中使用药物的众多相互关联的风险因素，但很少有研究同时用具有全国代表性的大样本来检验一整套推定的风险和因素。由于这些研究在目标人群、样本量、测量和其他方法学特征方面的差异，先前研究结果的整合受到了阻碍。这项拟议的研究试图通过利用对青少年家庭人口及其父母的单一的、具有全国代表性的横断面调查，并检查多个领域的一组全面的假设风险因素，来促进我们对青少年药物使用风险因素的理解。我们将利用1999年全国药物滥用家庭调查(NHSDA)来达到这一目的。NHSDA的大样本将使调查人员能够评估各种物质和物质使用阶段的风险/保护因素与物质使用之间的关系，并检查这些关系如何随年龄、性别、种族/民族和其他人口统计变量而变化。多变量逻辑建模程序将应用于这些目的。尽管1999年NHSDA的横截面性质排除了对要调查的关系中变量的时间顺序的明确评估，但拟议的研究将提供强有力的经验基础，以建立一组广泛的风险和保护因素与青少年药物使用行为之间的关联的存在、强度和稳健性。

Strategies for understanding and preventing adolescent substance use and other health risk behaviors have in recent years become increasingly couched in a risk and protective factor framework. Epidemiologically- based prevention approaches rooted in this framework seel to assess the levels of risk and protective factors in individuals or groups and then select and implement specific strategies that will effectively reduce elevated risk factors and/or enhance protective factors. Although research has identified numerous and interrelated risk factors for substance use among youth over the past two decades, very few studies have simultaneously examined comprehensive sets of putative risk and factors with large and nationally representative samples. The integration of findings from prior studies has been hampered by differences across these studies with respect to their target populations and sample sizes, measures, and other methodological features. The proposed study seeks to advance our understanding of risk factors for adolescent substance use by utilizing a single, nationally representative cross-sectional survey of the adolescent household population and their parents and examining a comprehensive set of hypothesized risk factors across multiple domains. We will utilize the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) for this purpose. The large NHSDA sample will enable the investigators to assess the relationship between risk/protective factors and substance use for a broad range of substances and stages of substance use, and to examine how these relationships vary by age, gender, racial/ethnic group, and other demographic variables. Multivariate logistic modeling procedures will be applied for these purposes. Although the cross-sectional nature of the 1999 NHSDA precludes definitive assessment of temporal ordering of the variables within the relationships to be investigated, the proposed study will provide a strong empirical basis on which to establish the existence, strength, and robustness of the associations between an expansive set of risk and protective factors and adolescent substance use behaviors.