Drug Abuse and Other Deviant Adaptations to Stress

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The candidate for a competing continuation Senior Scientist (K05) Award is Regents Professor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Marshall Professor of Liberal Arts, and Director for the Laboratory for Studies of Social Deviance at Texas A&M University. His work is carried out in a premier research university, college, department, laboratory characterized by a history of productive scholarship and research that facilitates achievement of both short and long-term career goals relating to research, career enhancement, and mentoring activities. The long-term goal is to apply ever-increasing expertise to the formulation, testing, and dissemination (by publication and instruction) of theotherically informed models of psychosocial causes and consequences of patterns of drug abuse and other deviant adaptations, and the moderators and common antecedents of these relations. The short-term goal focuses upon explaining changes in antecedents and consequences of drug abuse and other deviant patterns for a second generation (G2) panel initially testing during early adolescence (G2-T1) and followed up ten years later (G2-T2) during the five-year period of the K05 award. The subjects are the children of a first generation (G1) panel who were tested up to five times during the 7th (G1-T1), 8th (G1-T2), and 9th (G1-T3) grades, as young adults in their 20s (G1-T4), and most recently in the later part of the forth decade of life (G1-T5). Drug (ab)use and other deviant patterns and their consequences for G2 at T2 will be modeled as outcomes of linear direct and indirect (mediated) influences of G1 (T1- T5) and G2 (T1) variables (both personal interview data and census indictors of socio-environmental contexts); moderating influences of these same variables; and common antecedents (drawn from the same array of variables). The models, informed by the candidate's integrative general theory of deviance, will be estimated using structural equation/hierarchical linear modeling approaches among other methodologies. Enhancement of research skill will focus upon exposure to methodological developments, new findings in the life course and intergenerational influence literature, and collaboration with investigators using other longitudinal datasets. Mentoring activities include guidance of graduate students employed on the project and in a seminar taught by the candidate, and mentoring of junior faculty at Texas A&M and the University of Texas in the substance and method of research on drug abuse and other deviant adaptations.