Social Meanings of Drugs for Asian American Youth

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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.