NEW PSYCHOMETRIC METHODS FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE RESEARCH

拟议研究的具体目标如下： (a)心理测量新方法的发展与应用 (b)编写关于研究方法的非技术文件 (c)编写教程以改进药物滥用研究方法 (d)就方法问题与NIDA及其受赠方进行磋商。 该研究计划旨在开发新的 多元心理测量和统计技术，持有特殊 承诺提高对心理、社会、 行为、流行病学和健康相关的前因， 药物和酒精滥用的后果。 特别注意的是 结构建模方法，可以测试药物滥用理论的数据 在自然条件下获得。 主要工作是针对 制定方法，在下列情况下产生适当的统计推断： 应用于药物滥用研究中通常观察到的数据类型， 也就是说，非正态分布的变量表现出显著的 多变量偏斜和/或峰度。 虽然没有数据将被收集， 这项赠款，新开发的技术将得到广泛的评估， 对药物滥用研究的实际意义， 关于药物滥用方面重要实质性问题的报告 与加州大学洛杉矶分校/NIDA计划的联系，通过与国家合作， 积极的药物滥用研究人员在自己的项目工作，以及 通过与NIDA和其他卫生相关机构的合作。 方法 在这项赠款和其他地方开发的项目也将广泛地 通过上述目标（B）和（c）传播。

The specific aims of the proposed research are the following: (a) Development and application of new psychometric methods (b) Generation of nontechnical papers on research methodology (c) Creation of tutorials to improve methodology in drug abuse research (d) Consultation to NIDA and its grantees on methodology. The research program is directed towards the development of new multivariate psychometric and statistical techniques that hold special promise for improving the quality of research on the psychological, social, behavioral, epidemiological, and health-related antecedents and consequences of drug and alcohol abuse. Special attention is devoted to methods of structural modeling that can test theories of drug abuse on data obtained under natural conditions. Major efforts are directed to the development of methods that yield appropriate statistical inferences when applied to the type of data usually observed in substance abuse research, that is, non-normally distributed variables exhibiting substantial multivariate skew and/or kurtosis. While no data will be gathered under this grant, the newly developed techniques will be extensively evaluated for their practical relevance to drug abuse research by addressing important substantive issues in drug abuse on high-quality data obtained in association with the UCLA/NIDA program, via collaboration with nationally active substance abuse researchers working on their own projects, as well as by cooperation with NIDA and other health-related agencies. Methods that are developed under this grant and elsewhere will also be widely disseminated via goals (b) and (c) above.