Social Meanings of Drugs for Asian American Youth

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在探讨毒品及毒品使用对亚裔美国青年的社会意义。虽然亚裔美国人通常被认为很少吸毒和酗酒，但在特定的亚群体中发现了一些令人不安的药物使用模式；然而，关于年轻亚裔美国人吸毒和酗酒的研究却很少。首席研究员对旧金山湾区31名吸毒的老挝和柬埔寨青年进行了初步研究，发现吸毒行为和规范与青年的身份意识交织在一起，位于混合的东南亚青年文化中，因此这些毒品规范反映了基于当地的毒品和吸毒结构。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This study aims to investigate the social meanings of drugs and drug use for Asian American youth. While Asian Americans are typically considered to have low drug and alcohol use, some troubling patterns of substance use have been identified in specific subgroups; yet there have been few studies of drug and alcohol use among young Asian Americans. The Principal Investigator's preliminary study of 31 drug-involved Laotian and Cambodian youth in the San Francisco Bay Area found that drug use practices and norms are entwined with youths' sense of identity, located within a hybridized Southeast Asian youth culture, and as such these drug norms reflect locally-based constructs of drugs and drug use. Through two waves of in-depth interviews with 140 currently or formerly drug-involved Southeast Asian youths in the East Bay Area over a five-year period, this proposed project will investigate the relationship between drug constructs and sense of identity in the drug pathways of these second generation youth. The proposed study will target males and females, and track changes in drug use, sense of identity and drug constructs by conducting two waves of interviews with youths aged 15-23 at the time of the first wave of data collection. The proposed project specifically aims to: 1. Assess youths' sense of identity of themselves and their primary peer group; 2. Elicit youths' understandings of the effects, consequences, costs, and social valence of specific drugs, including validating the pilot study findings on perceived associations of specific drugs with ethnic, class, and neighborhood identities; and 3. Describe youths' pathways from experimentation to occasional or regular use of specific drugs, as well as to quitting, as these pathways relate to changing sense of self and peer group. The proposed study addresses the aims of NIH PA-02-043, which encourages research on the social and cultural dimensions of health.