Preventing Substance Use and Risky Behavior Among Rural African American Youth

描述(由申请人提供)：将参与拟议研究计划的家庭生活在佐治亚州农村的小城镇和社区，那里的贫困率是全国最高的之一，失业率高于全国平均水平。因此，格鲁吉亚农村的许多非裔美国家庭长期承受着经济和环境压力，这可能会对青少年造成损害。最近的流行病学数据表明，农村地区的非裔美国青年使用毒品和从事高风险性行为的比率等于或超过居住在人口稠密的市中心的青年。这些高危行为预测艾滋病毒和其他性传播感染、青少年父母身份、辍学、参与刑事司法系统以及成年后使用药物。目前，还没有制定出在发展和文化上适当的预防方案，以阻止生活在南方农村的数百万非裔美国青少年使用药物和高危性行为。为了满足这一公共卫生需求，乔治亚大学的Brody博士和Murry博士以及Emory大学的DiClemente博士和WinGood博士设计并开发了强大的非裔美国家庭-高中项目(SAAF-HS)。在这项申请中，要求提供资金以评估这一以家庭为中心的多组成部分预防计划。干预的实施是以Brody和Murry的强大非裔美国人家庭计划(SAAF)为蓝本的，SAAF是一种针对农村非裔美国人青春期前的有效预防性干预措施。该计划包括七次每周会议，其中包括为青少年及其父母单独举行的会议，然后是青少年和父母相互互动的家庭会议，以应用他们在单独会议上学到的技能。样本将由572个有10年级学生的家庭组成，其中一半将被随机分配到SAAF-HS项目中，一半将被分配到注意控制组。将从整个样本中收集青少年药物使用和高危性行为的干预前、干预后和长期跟踪评估。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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 application, 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 African American 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.