Education and Alcohol Use in Adolescence and Young Adulthood

描述（由申请人提供）： 摘要：作为教育与健康之间联系的一个关键维度，多年来一直吸引着社会和行为科学家，中学/中学后教育与酒精使用之间的联系在理论上是重要的。这种联系关注的是历史上被视为适合政策干预的制度环境，也指出了这种理论活动可以应用的方式。虽然教育经验对青少年饮酒的潜在影响已被频繁研究，但在许多方面并没有得到很好的理解，这对知情干预有影响。因此，遵循R21机制的“发展”精神，该项目利用现有数据来研究教育-饮酒联系中不为人知的方面，并在此过程中支持未来的主要数据收集，这些数据收集侧重于教育-饮酒联系中最重要的方面，同时解决当前的数据局限性。首先，需要更好地评估和确定与青少年饮酒有关的高中学术地位和环境的具体方面，以及这些关联的机制。该项目利用了一个独特的数据集--整合了全国青少年健康纵向研究（Add Health），这是一项具有全国代表性的早期生命过程中健康行为的研究，以及青少年健康和学业成就研究（AHAA），该研究为Add Health增加了丰富的学校成绩单和教科书数据。这一综合数据集使饮酒研究能够通过教育理论和测量的重要创新获得信息，包括更准确地呈现：（a）青少年在学校学术层次中的地位，（B）他们在整个学校上课的同学的特征，以及（c）认知技能（例如，批判性分析），他们通过课程开发，并可以在健康决策中借鉴。第二，在何种程度上的教育饮酒的链接不同阶段的生命历程将被认为是通过绘制中学后AHAA数据，假设是大学的学术和社会环境的重要性，年轻人的饮酒将取决于他们的学术和社会历史，作为青少年在高中。第三，利用Add Health的遗传样本和DNA数据，该项目将评估潜在和特定遗传影响与教育-饮酒联系混淆的程度，以及它们是否调节/触发了教育经历对青少年和青年饮酒的影响。该研究团队包括社会学家和临床/发展心理学家，他们在饮酒，教育或两者的研究方面都有经验，包括与Add Health/AHAA合作，并使用先进的统计技术和遗传信息设计。这个R21的目标是探索新的方法来解决教育与饮酒联系的老问题，以一种具有成本效益的策略，使未来更大规模的数据收集能够更有效地设计。 公共卫生相关性： 项目叙述：研究特定的学术地位和饮酒环境的影响，以及它们背后的社会和认知机制，从青春期到青年期的过渡，对于理论上理解风险行为如何在一个旨在促进美国年轻人长期社会经济成就和公民参与的社会机构中受到约束和支持的一般问题非常重要。鉴于大学校园内未成年人饮酒和酗酒长期以来一直是美国主要的公共卫生问题，正式组织（例如，高中）比其他对饮酒的社会影响（例如，同龄人团体），学校和学院的任务已扩大到包括促进健康。通过这些方式，这个R 21项目代表了在建立青少年和成年早期饮酒教育知情方法方面迈出的重要一步。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Abstract: Drinking among high school and college students has long been a major public health concern in the U.S. As a key dimension of the connection between education and health, which has fascinated social and behavioral scientists for years, this link between secondary/postsecondary education and alcohol use is theoretically important. Focusing as it does on institutional settings that historically have been viewed as amenable to policy intervention, this link also points to ways that that such theoretical activity can be applied. Although the potential impact of educational experiences on youth drinking has been studied frequently, it is not well-understood in many ways that have implications for informing intervention. Following the "developmental" spirit of the R21 mechanism, therefore, this project draws on extant data to look into insufficiently known aspects of the education-drinking link and, in the process, support future primary data collections that focus on the most important aspects of the education-drinking link while addressing current data limitations. First, the specific dimensions of high school academic statuses and settings that matter to adolescent drinking, as well as the mechanisms underlying these associations, need to be better assessed and identified. This project draws on a unique data set-the integration of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of health behavior in the early life course, and the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study (AHAA), which adds rich school transcript and textbook data to Add Health. This integrated data set allows the study of drinking to be informed by important innovations in educational theory and measurement, including more accurate renderings of: (a) adolescents' positions in the academic hierarchies of their schools, (b) the characteristics of their fellow students that they take classes with throughout school, and (c) the cognitive skills (e.g., critical analysis) that they develop through coursework and can draw on in health decision-making. Second, the extent to which the education-drinking link varies across stages of the life course will be considered by drawing on postsecondary AHAA data, the hypothesis being that the importance of the academic and social settings of colleges to the drinking of young adults will depend on their academic and social histories as adolescents in high school. Third, drawing on the genetic samples and DNA data of Add Health, this project will assess the degree to which both latent and specific genetic influences are confounded with the education-drinking link and whether they condition/trigger the effects of educational experiences on drinking in adolescence and young adulthood. The investigatory team includes sociologists and clinical/developmental psychologists who have experience in research on drinking, education, or both, including working with Add Health/AHAA and using advanced statistical techniques and genetically informed designs. The goal of this R21 is to explore fresh approaches to old questions about the education-drinking link in a cost-effective strategy that allows future, larger-scale data collections to be more effectively designed. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Project Narrative: Studying the implications of specific academic statuses and settings for drinking-and the social and cognitive mechanisms underlying them-across the transition from adolescence into young adulthood is important for theoretical understanding of the general issue of how risky behavior can be both constrained and supported within a societal institution designed to promote the long-term socioeconomic attainment and civic participation of young Americans. Such research is also high in policy relevance, given that underage drinking and binge drinking on college campuses have long been major public health concerns in the U.S., that formal organizations (e.g., high schools) are more amenable to policy intervention than other social influences on drinking (e.g., peer groups), and that the missions of schools and colleges have been expanded to include health promotion. In these ways, this R21 project represents an important step in building educationally- informed approaches to drinking in adolescence and young adulthood.