Age-related patterns in high-risk alcohol and cannabis use and their associations with positive and negative affect in young adulthood.

OBJECTIVE: We examined age-varying associations between young adult simultaneous alcohol and marijuana/cannabis use (SAM) and heavy episodic drinking (HED) and positive and negative affect to inform harm reduction efforts. METHODS: Young adults reporting past-year alcohol use (n = 556; ages 19-25) were recruited in a state where alcohol and nonmedical cannabis use was legal for those 21 +. Participants provided 24 repeated monthly assessments. Among those reporting past-month cannabis use on at least one survey, logistic time-varying effect models estimated (1) the age-varying prevalence of and associations between past-month SAM and HED and (2) age-varying unique associations of affect with SAM and HED. RESULTS: There was a positive age-varying association between HED and SAM over time that was highest at age 19 (OR = 7.56), decreased until age 20.7 (OR = 3.39), increased until age 23.0 (OR = 4.85), and decreased until the association became non-significant by age 25. Negative affect was positively associated with SAM from ages 20.7 to 23.0, peaking at age 21.8 (OR = 1.36). Positive affect was positively associated with HED from ages 19.4 to 20.4 (peak OR = 1.25) and ages 22.5 to 24.5 (peak OR = 1.38). In contrast, positive affect was not uniquely associated with SAM nor negative affect with HED across ages 19-25. CONCLUSIONS: While HED and SAM were positively associated throughout young adulthood and interventions could target them in tandem, their associations with affect suggest differential etiologic processes. Preventive intervention and harm reduction efforts should attend to psychological context in which these behaviors occur.

Assessing the effects of a school-based intervention on unscheduled school transfers during elementary school.

Raising Healthy Children is a cluster-randomized study of a school-based intervention aimed at preventing problem behaviors among children recruited into the project in the first or second grade of elementary school. Multilevel analysis was used to compare students in intervention and control schools with respect to whether they transferred out of their original schools. Students in intervention schools were less likely to transfer within the first 5 years of the project. A multilevel discrete-time survival model that included both time-varying and contextual variables revealed that the difference in hazard of transfer was greatest in the earlier years of the project.

An experimental intervention with families of substance abusers: one-year follow-up of the focus on families project.

AIMS: Children whose parents abuse drugs are exposed to numerous factors that increase the likelihood of future drug abuse. Despite this heightened risk, few experimental tests of prevention programs with this population have been reported. This article examines whether intensive family-focused interventions with methadone treated parents can reduce parents' drug use and prevent children's initiation of drug use. DESIGN: Parents were assigned randomly into intervention and control conditions and assessed at baseline, post-test, and 6 and 12 months following the intervention. Children were assessed at baseline, and 6- and 12-month follow-up points. SETTING: Two methadone clinics in Seattle, Washington. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred and forty-four methadone-treated parents, and their children (n = 178) ranging in age from 3 to 14 years old. INTERVENTION: The experimental intervention supplemented methadone treatment with 33 sessions of family training combined with 9 months of home-based case management. Families in the control condition received no supplemental services. MEASUREMENT: Parent measures included: relapse and problem-solving skills, self-report measures of family management practices, deviant peer networks, domestic conflict and drug use. Child measures included self-report measures of rules, family attachment, parental involvement, school attachment and misbehavior, negative peers, substance use and delinquency. FINDINGS: One year after the family skills training, results indicate significant positive changes among parents, especially in the areas of parent skills, parent drug use, deviant peers and family management. Few changes were noted in children's behavior or attitudes. CONCLUSIONS: Programs such as this may be an important adjunct to treatment programs, helping to strengthen family bonding and to reduce parents' drug use.

Opening the black box: using process evaluation measures to assess implementation and theory building.

The past decade has seen increasing recognition in prevention science of the need to move away from a black box approach to intervention evaluation and toward an approach that can elaborate on the mechanisms through which changes in the outcomes operate (Chen & Rossi, 1989; Durlak & Wells, 1997; Spoth et al., 1995). An approach that examines issues of program implementation is particularly critical in the design of efficacy studies of school-based preventive interventions. Numerous preventive intervention strategies are now delivered within the schools, often by regular classroom teachers. The extent to which teachers faithfully deliver a particular curriculum or incorporate instructional strategies emphasized by an intervention is a critical question for the overall project evaluation. This article illustrates the utilization of process measures from a multicomponent school-based prevention program to examine implementation of a teaching staff development intervention, and the program's underlying theoretical basis. Given the nested study design, the analyses utilize hierarchical linear models (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992) to examine changes in teaching strategies by condition and investigate the hypothesized relationships between teaching practices and student behaviors based on the program's theoretical framework. Results suggest that teaching practices in two of the six intervention focus areas were positively impacted in the first 18 months of the project. Findings also support the relationships between teachers' instructional practices and students' behavior.

Drug use predictors of partner violence in opiate-dependent women.

This paper examines the use of specific drugs as longitudinal predictors of violence between domestic partners in a sample of women in methadone treatment for opiate addiction. Crack cocaine use, use of other forms of cocaine, and tranquilizer use are each modestly to moderately positively associated with partner violence victimization. Women who were heavy users of these drugs were more likely to be hit, slapped, or shoved by their partners than light users or nonusers of these drugs. Three possible explanations of these associations are considered.

A meta-analysis of predictors of continued drug use during and after treatment for opiate addiction.

AIMS: Many people treated for opiate addiction continue to use drugs during and after treatment. It may be possible to improve outcomes by addressing patient characteristics that predict continued drug use. This review uses meta-analytic techniques to identify risk factors for continued drug use in patients treated for opiate abuse. DESIGN AND MEASUREMENTS: A thorough search of the published literature yielded 69 studies that reported information on the bivariate association between one or more independent variables and continued use of illicit drugs during and after treatment for opiate addiction. FINDINGS: Most of the patient variables summarized have weak longitudinal relationships with continued drug use, although several variables display moderate longitudinal associations. Ten variables show statistically significant and longitudinally predictive relationships (average r > 0.1) with continued use, including: high level of pretreatment opiate/drug use, prior treatment for opiate addiction, no prior abstinence from opiates, abstinence from/light use of alcohol, depression, high stress, unemployment/employment problems, association with substance abusing peers, short length of treatment, and leaving treatment prior to completion. Several other variables may be potentially longitudinally predictive. CONCLUSIONS: To prevent relapse, treatment interventions should address multiple variables because no single variable strongly predicts continued drug use.