Preventing Substance Use and Risky Behavior Among Rural African American Youth

描述（由申请人提供）：将参加拟议研究项目的家庭生活在佐治亚州农村的小城镇和社区，那里的贫困率是全国最高的，失业率高于全国平均水平。因此，佐治亚州农村的许多非裔美国家庭长期生活在经济和环境压力之下，这可能会对青少年造成伤害。最近的流行病学数据表明，农村地区的非裔美国青年使用药物和进行高风险性活动的比率等于或超过了居住在人口稠密的内城的青年。这些高风险行为预示着艾滋病毒和其他性传播感染、青少年父母、辍学、参与刑事司法系统以及成年后的药物使用。目前，在生活在南方农村的数百万非洲裔美国青少年中，没有发展和文化上适当的预防计划来阻止物质使用和高风险的性行为。为了满足这一公共卫生需求，乔治亚大学的布罗迪和默里博士。来自埃默里大学的迪克莱门特和温伍德设计并开发了强大的非裔美国人家庭高中项目（SAAF-HS）。在本申请中，申请资金用于评估这个多成分、以家庭为中心的预防项目。干预措施的实施模仿了布罗迪和默里的“强大的非洲裔美国人家庭计划”（SAAF），这是一个针对农村非洲裔美国人青春期前的有效预防干预措施。该计划包括每周七次会议，其中包括青少年和父母的单独会议，随后是家庭会议，青少年和父母在家庭会议中相互交流，应用他们在单独会议中学到的技能。样本将由572个有一个10年级学生的家庭组成，其中一半将被随机分配到SAAF-HS项目中，另一半将被分配到一个注意力控制组。将从整个样本中收集青少年物质使用和高危性行为的干预前、干预后和长期随访评估。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The families who will participate in the proposed research program live in small towns and communities in rural Georgia, in which poverty rates are among the highest in the nation and unemployment rates are above the national average. Many African American families in rural Georgia thus live with chronic economic and contextual stress that can take a toll on adolescents. Recent epidemiologic data indicate that African American youth in rural areas use substances and engage in high-risk sexual activity at rates equal to or exceeding those of youth living in densely populated inner cities. These high-risk behaviors forecast HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, adolescent parenthood, school dropout, involvement with the criminal justice system, and substance use during adulthood. Currently, no developmental and culturally appropriate prevention programs have been developed to deter substance use and high-risk sexual behavior among the several million African American adolescents who live in the rural South. To address this public health need, Drs. Brody and Murry from the University of Georgia and Drs. DiClemente and Wingood from Emory University designed and developed the Strong African American Families-High School program (SAAF-HS). In this application, funding is requested for evaluating this multicomponent, family-centered prevention program. The intervention's delivery is modeled after Brody and Murry's Strong African American Families Program (SAAF), an efficacious preventive intervention for rural African American preadolescents. The program consists of seven weekly meetings that include separate sessions for adolescents and their parents, followed by family sessions in which youth and parents interact with each other to apply the skills they learned in their separate sessions. The sample will consist of 572 families with a 10th-grade student, half of whom will be assigned randomly to the SAAF-HS program and half of whom will be assigned to an attention-control group. Pre-intervention, post-intervention, and long-term follow-up assessments of adolescents' substance use and high risk sexual behavior will be gathered from the entire sample.