Psychological & Familial Influences on Health Behavior

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The current proposal requests funding for two additional waves of data collection for the Family and Community Health Study, a longitudinal study of the role that families and communities play in the inhibition and promotion of African American adolescents' risk behavior (e.g. substance use and risky sexual behavior). Each of the 897 families in the study has a target child who was age 10 at Wave 1 and a primary caregiver, and one-third have an older sibling who was between the ages of 12 and 14 at Wave 1. The proposed extension of this study will follow the families until the target children are 17, the developmental period of the greatest increase in risk behavior, and the siblings to age 19, a period during which problematic habits of substance use are likely to have emerged. Our general approach in this research is social-psychological and is based on our model of adolescent health risk. The specific focus of the model is on the cognitive factors that mediate the links between parenting, neighborhood context, and the child's disposition on the one hand, and child's decisions to avoid or engage in risk behavior on the other hand.