Social Meanings of Drugs for Asian American Youth

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在调查毒品和吸毒对亚裔美国青少年的社会意义。虽然亚裔美国人通常被认为吸毒和酗酒的比例较低，但在特定亚群体中也发现了一些令人不安的物质使用模式；然而，关于年轻亚裔美国人吸毒和酗酒的研究却很少。首席研究员对旧金山湾区 31 名老挝和柬埔寨吸毒青少年进行的初步研究发现，吸毒行为和规范与青少年的身份感交织在一起，处于混合的东南亚青年文化中，因此这些吸毒规范反映了当地对毒品和吸毒的认识。 通过在五年内对东湾区 140 名目前或曾经吸毒的东南亚青少年进行两轮深度访谈，该项目将调查这些第二代青少年吸毒途径中毒品结构与认同感之间的关系。拟议的研究将针对男性和女性，通过在第一波数据收集时对 15 至 23 岁的青少年进行两波访谈，追踪药物使用、认同感和药物结构的变化。拟议项目的具体目标是： 1. 评估青少年对自己及其主要同龄群体的认同感； 2. 引导青少年了解特定药物的影响、后果、成本和社会价，包括验证特定药物与种族、阶级和邻里身份之间感知关联的试点研究结果；和 3. 描述青少年从尝试特定药物到偶尔或定期使用特定药物以及戒烟的过程，因为这些过程与自我意识和同伴群体意识的变化有关。 拟议的研究旨在实现 NIH PA-02-043 的目标，即鼓励对健康的社会和文化层面进行研究。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This study aims to investigate the social meanings of drugs and drug use for Asian American youth. While Asian Americans are typically considered to have low drug and alcohol use, some troubling patterns of substance use have been identified in specific subgroups; yet there have been few studies of drug and alcohol use among young Asian Americans. The Principal Investigator's preliminary study of 31 drug-involved Laotian and Cambodian youth in the San Francisco Bay Area found that drug use practices and norms are entwined with youths' sense of identity, located within a hybridized Southeast Asian youth culture, and as such these drug norms reflect locally-based constructs of drugs and drug use. Through two waves of in-depth interviews with 140 currently or formerly drug-involved Southeast Asian youths in the East Bay Area over a five-year period, this proposed project will investigate the relationship between drug constructs and sense of identity in the drug pathways of these second generation youth. The proposed study will target males and females, and track changes in drug use, sense of identity and drug constructs by conducting two waves of interviews with youths aged 15-23 at the time of the first wave of data collection. The proposed project specifically aims to: 1. Assess youths' sense of identity of themselves and their primary peer group; 2. Elicit youths' understandings of the effects, consequences, costs, and social valence of specific drugs, including validating the pilot study findings on perceived associations of specific drugs with ethnic, class, and neighborhood identities; and 3. Describe youths' pathways from experimentation to occasional or regular use of specific drugs, as well as to quitting, as these pathways relate to changing sense of self and peer group. The proposed study addresses the aims of NIH PA-02-043, which encourages research on the social and cultural dimensions of health.