Social Meanings of Drugs for Asian American Youth

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在调查亚裔美国青年的药物和药物使用的社会意义。虽然亚裔美国人通常被认为药物和酒精使用率较低，但在特定的亚组中发现了一些令人不安的物质使用模式;但很少有关于年轻亚裔美国人药物和酒精使用的研究。首席研究员对弗朗西斯科湾区31名涉及毒品的老挝和柬埔寨青年进行的初步研究发现，毒品使用的做法和规范与青年的身份认同感有关，位于混合的东南亚青年文化中，因此这些毒品规范反映了当地的毒品和毒品使用结构。 本研究计划在五年期间，透过两波深入访谈140名现时或曾在东湾区吸毒的东南亚青少年，探讨第二代青少年吸毒途径中的毒品建构与认同感之间的关系。拟议的研究将以男性和女性为对象，在第一波数据收集时对15至23岁的青年进行两波访谈，跟踪吸毒、身份认同感和毒品结构的变化。拟议项目的具体目标是： 1. 评估青少年对自己和主要朋辈的认同感; 2. 启发青少年对特定药物的影响、后果、成本和社会价值的理解，包括验证关于特定药物与种族、阶级和社区身份的感知关联的试点研究结果; 3.描述青少年从实验到偶尔或定期使用特定药物以及戒烟的途径，因为这些途径与改变自我和同龄人群体的感觉有关。 这项拟议的研究涉及NIH PA-02-043的目标，该目标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.