Neighborhood, Race and Alcohol Use /Abuse Trajectories

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many studies have considered how personal background and family functioning are linked to alcohol use, progression, and desistance. The proposed study is novel in its potential to reveal the ways in which broader social contexts-neighborhoods and schools-contribute to the etiology of alcohol use and abuse. Data are drawn from a prospective, longitudinal study of 3000 youth living in 80 neighborhoods of Chicago. Subjects were surveyed on three occasions over 6 years, and range in age from 9 to 23. The study was designed to include 1) large numbers of three major race/ethnic subgroups (white, black and Hispanic); 2) substantial socioeconomic variation and overlap within each of these race/ethnic subgroups; and 3) substantial variation in the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic composition of the study neighborhoods. Considerable information collected through surveys, observations, and other sources enable the research team to characterize the social processes in the neighborhoods in which the study participants have resided and in the schools that they have attended. The proposed work follows our previous findings, based on cross-sectional data, that neighborhood context accounted for roughly 50% of the observed black-white disparity in adolescent annual alcohol use rates. The disparity in alcohol use between a black and white youth living in the same neighborhood is roughly half that observed between the average black and white youth in the city of Chicago. Given this evidence of the strong association between neighborhood context and alcohol use, this study aims to 1) describe race/ethnic differences in alcohol use from age 9-23; 2) examine the extent to which these can be accounted for by group differences in socioeconomic status and immigrant generational status; 3) examine the extent to which these differences can be attributed to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic segregation of groups into different residential and/or school contexts; and 4) determine whether a set of theoretically indicated characteristics of schools and neighborhoods explain these contextual effects. In addition, this study will also support the development of advanced statistical techniques needed to simultaneously estimate school and neighborhood contributions to race/ethnic disparities in alcohol use.