Preventing Substance Use and Risky Behavior Among Rural African American Youth

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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 proposal, 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 AfricanAmerican 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.