This proposal seeks five years of support to collect and analyze data on the children of the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP) panel. The proposed study will collect data from this third generation and their parents to examine the effects of current and past parental and grandparental substance use on child development. We have recently received a separate grant to follow up the full SSDP panel at ages 24 and 27 (P.I., J. David Hawkins), and have entered the field period of the age 24 interview. The two companion studies have complementary but separate aims. The SSDP panel study has focused on understanding childhood and adolescent risk and protective factors predictive of substance abuse, violence, and related health and behavior problems. The multiethnic urban of 808 males and females, constituted in 1985 when subjects entered the fifth grade in 18 elementary schools serving high crime neighborhoods, ahs been tracked and interviewed over an eleven-year period through 1996 when subjects were 21 years old. Extensive data are also available on these subjects' parents. Panel members are now having children of their own. The proposed study will obtain archival data for the oldest children of SSDP panel members from birth to three years of age, from birth certificates, Medicaid records for measures of prenatal, birth and postpartum maternal and child health, and social system involvement. The study will collect interview and observational data on cognitive, affective, academic and social development of these children from birth to early adolescence, and assessments of parenting practices and parent-child relationship quality. Data collection in the third generation will include self-reports of substance use initiation, and delinquent and other conduct problems, and a diagnostic assessment at age 6 of conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and attention deficit/hyperactive disorder. The proposed study will examine the effects of present and past parental and grandparental substance use on these child outcomes, and will examine hypothesized mechanisms producing these effects. Measurement and analyses are guided by the investigators' social development model, which organizes empirical findings on risk and protective factors into a causal theory. The study will provide vital information on the effects and mechanisms of past and current parental substance abuse and parenting practices on children for use in designing preventive interventions.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter