Session: Family Influences on Substance Use Across the Life-Course (Society for Prevention Research 24th Annual Meeting)

Family factors, including dimensions of family functioning and substance use have been identified as key mechanisms to target for substance use prevention, however, the majority of studies to date have focused on childhood and adolescence.  The present symposium of papers takes a broad, life-course perspective that seeks to understand how family factors are intertwined with individual development from childhood through the mid 30’s (paper 1), what factors may moderate these influences, particularly in adolescence (paper 2), and subsequently, what factors predict continued substance use among those individuals who become parents themselves (paper 3).  Data are drawn from three different longitudinal studies: the Seattle Social Development Project, the SSDP Intergenerational Study, and the Raising Healthy Children study.  

The first study takes a broad life-course developmental view and integrates insights from developmental cascades/life-course theory and those from the Social Development Model to examine the interplay between individual and social-developmental factors in the development of positive functioning, substance use problems, and mental health problems from age 10 to age 33.  The following two papers zero in on particular developmental periods to examine this interplay in more detail. The second study employs a relatively new methodological technique, time-varying effect modeling (TVEM), to examine the changes in association between family management, family conflict and family smoking on daily smoking from age 10 to 19. In addition, the study examines the extent to which, and across which ages in particular, these relationships are moderated by gender and behavioral disinhibition.  As people move from adolescence into adulthood, many begin starting families of their own, and this in itself often encourages desistance from substance use.  However, a significant proportion of parents continue using substances, yet little is known about drug use patterns among adults who are parents or how to best intervene with this population.  The third study focuses analyses on the next developmental period when many are raising children of their own, and examines the factors that influence change in parent marijuana use over time, a topic of high public health interest in this period of rapid legalization in the US.

Collectively these studies suggest new avenues for preventive intervention with families across developmental periods and across generations, as moderated by individual characteristics.  The symposium is joined by a discussant who brings expertise in addiction etiology and data-intensive longitudinal methods to lead the audience discussion of the findings.