Statistical Support for Studying School and Neighborhood Effects on

Alcohol Use and Dependence

This is a proposal to do methodological work in support of a larger study of school and neighborhood effects on alcohol use among adolescents growing up in Chicago. The larger study considers the onset of alcohol use and its persistence and desistance during the transition through secondary school into early adulthood. Many studies have considered how personal background and family functioning are linked to the early onset of alcohol use and to later persistence and desistance. What is novel about the proposed study is its potential to reveal the ways in which broader social contexts – neighborhoods and schools – contribute to the etiology of alcohol use and dependence. Considerable information collected through surveys, observations, and other assessments enable the researchers to characterize in some detail the social processes at work in the neighborhoods in which the study participants have resided and the schools they have attended. With this information in mind, it becomes possible a) to study associations between personal and family risk factors and outcomes while controlling for neighborhood residence and school attended; b) to assess whether these associations generalize across neighborhoods and across schools or whether they are best viewed as context specific; c) to assess whether neighborhood norms, neighborhood social cohesion, and neighborhood social support modify the risk of early onset substance use and the development of alcohol use and later dependence; d) to assess whether school instructional effectiveness and communal organization predict onset and dependence; and e) to assess whether a favorable school environment protects young people from the negative effects of an unfavorable neighborhood environment; and e) conversely, whether a favorable neighborhood environment protects young people from the negative effects of an unfavorable school environment.