Neighborhood, Race and Alcohol Use /Abuse Trajectories

描述（由申请人提供）：许多研究都考虑了个人背景和家庭功能与酒精使用、进展和戒酒之间的关系。这项提议的研究是新颖的，因为它有可能揭示更广泛的社会背景——社区和学校——对酒精使用和滥用的病因有何影响。数据来自对芝加哥80个社区的3000名青年的前瞻性纵向研究。研究对象在6年内进行了三次调查，年龄从9岁到23岁不等。该研究的设计包括：1)三个主要种族/民族亚群（白人、黑人和西班牙裔）的大量受试者；2)这些种族/民族亚群体内部存在显著的社会经济差异和重叠；3)研究社区的社会经济、种族和民族构成存在实质性差异。通过调查、观察和其他来源收集的大量信息使研究小组能够描述研究参与者所居住的社区和他们所就读的学校的社会进程。我们之前的研究是基于横断面数据得出的，该研究表明，在青少年年酒精使用率方面，社区环境约占观察到的黑人-白人差异的50%。居住在同一社区的黑人和白人青年在酒精使用方面的差异大约是芝加哥黑人和白人青年平均水平的一半。鉴于社区环境与酒精使用之间存在强烈关联的证据，本研究旨在1)描述9-23岁之间酒精使用的种族/民族差异；2)考察社会经济地位和移民代际地位的群体差异在多大程度上可以解释这些差异；3)研究这些差异在多大程度上可归因于不同居住和/或学校背景下的种族、民族和社会经济隔离；4)确定学校和社区的一系列理论特征是否可以解释这些情境效应。此外，这项研究还将支持开发先进的统计技术，以同时估计学校和社区对酒精使用的种族/民族差异的贡献。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many studies have considered how personal background and family functioning are linked to alcohol use, progression, and desistance. The proposed study is novel in its potential to reveal the ways in which broader social contexts-neighborhoods and schools-contribute to the etiology of alcohol use and abuse. Data are drawn from a prospective, longitudinal study of 3000 youth living in 80 neighborhoods of Chicago. Subjects were surveyed on three occasions over 6 years, and range in age from 9 to 23. The study was designed to include 1) large numbers of three major race/ethnic subgroups (white, black and Hispanic); 2) substantial socioeconomic variation and overlap within each of these race/ethnic subgroups; and 3) substantial variation in the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic composition of the study neighborhoods. Considerable information collected through surveys, observations, and other sources enable the research team to characterize the social processes in the neighborhoods in which the study participants have resided and in the schools that they have attended. The proposed work follows our previous findings, based on cross-sectional data, that neighborhood context accounted for roughly 50% of the observed black-white disparity in adolescent annual alcohol use rates. The disparity in alcohol use between a black and white youth living in the same neighborhood is roughly half that observed between the average black and white youth in the city of Chicago. Given this evidence of the strong association between neighborhood context and alcohol use, this study aims to 1) describe race/ethnic differences in alcohol use from age 9-23; 2) examine the extent to which these can be accounted for by group differences in socioeconomic status and immigrant generational status; 3) examine the extent to which these differences can be attributed to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic segregation of groups into different residential and/or school contexts; and 4) determine whether a set of theoretically indicated characteristics of schools and neighborhoods explain these contextual effects. In addition, this study will also support the development of advanced statistical techniques needed to simultaneously estimate school and neighborhood contributions to race/ethnic disparities in alcohol use.