Session: Mapping the Social Environment: Seeking Optimal Strategies to Assess Environmental Predictors of Substance Use and Related Outcomes (Society for Prevention Research 21st Annual Meeting)

This symposium addresses the intersection of two of this year’s special conference themes: (1) Social and Environmental Determinants of Health, and (2) Common Pathways to and Impact on Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.  Much has been learned in prevention science about the social and environmental factors influencing substance use and related outcomes. The last 30 years of etiological research has identified a broad set of predictors in the family, school, peer and community domains (e.g., Arthur, et al., 2005 list 32 predictors), as well as shown that these factors likely represent a set of common pathways to a range of developmental outcomes including delinquency and violence, school dropout, and HIV sexual risk behavior. A deeper understanding of the etiology of substance use and related outcomes could be gained by developing models that integrate this broad range of influences, however, in doing so the predictive models become rapidly complex and unwieldy. Thus, one of the current challenges in the field is capture their joint, ecological influence in a manner that is exhaustive, yet parsimonious. 

The present symposium reflects a collaboration between two longitudinal prevention studies: the Seattle Social Development Project and Raising Healthy Children currently working on a project of gene-environment interplay in the development of tobacco, alcohol and related problems. The first paper, by Bailey et al., focuses specifically on influences from the family domain, and presents an approach summarizing their influence parsimoniously, yet still with attention to depth of assessment and to development.  The second paper, by Lee, et al., extends consideration of predictors to include family, peer, school and community factors, and examines a cumulative risk approach to predicting alcohol use disorder at the transition to adulthood, as well as later (at age 33).  Finally, the third paper by Hill, et al., draws on data from a national normative database and from a prospective longitudinal community study to examine the joint, collective influence general and specific family, peer, school and community environmental predictors in adolescence on risk behavior outcomes cross-sectionally, and prospectively in adulthood. 

Together these papers present strategies to represent comprehensively, yet parsimoniously environmental predictors of substance use and related outcomes.  These approaches should be useful not just for studies integrating genetic and environmental influences, but for any study seeking to examine a range of influences in an ecological framework. The symposium is joined by a discussant, and discussion is also encouraged from symposium attendees.