Session: Assessing Peer Network Health in Urban Primary Care with Young Adolescents: Implications for Prevention Strategies (Society for Prevention Research 25th Annual Meeting)

Primary health care settings represent an opportune location to address adolescent substance use, due to the settings’ typically reassuring climate. Urban primary care settings in particular can provide a range of behavioral health opportunities for underserved populations such as African American adolescents. Unfortunately, African American adolescents are less likely to have health insurance and to be receiving medical care for all of their health needs. However, the good news is that most adolescents see a primary care physician at least once per year and have good rapport with their physicians, providing an opening for behavioral assessment and ultimately preventive interventions. An important under-assessed behavioral construct is peer network health (the sum of peer risk and protective behaviors). Peer network health can be conceptualized as a malleable risk or protective force, representing a socially-based mechanism that can be targeted for brief interventions within primary care settings. Recent research supports the clinical effectiveness of targeting peer network characteristics such as social support within behavioral interventions directed at adolescent substance use involvement. A recent review of the mechanisms of change within adolescent substance use interventions found that positive social support was a primary mechanism identified to mediate intervention effects.

Before more behavioral interventions are tested within primary care, clear assessment protocols need to be developed, tested, and validated. This symposium will provide guidance on assessing peer network health through three different studies, demonstrating the methods, and the utility of including this construct within data analytic models. The parent study from which these sub-studies are drawn was a NIDA funded longitudinal project titled, “Social-spatial risk and protective mechanisms in urban adolescent substance use.”

This symposium will include three presentations covering the following topics:

1. School, Friends, and Substance Use: Gender Differences on the Influence of Attitudes toward School and Peer Networks on Cannabis Involvement
2. Longitudinal study on victimization of relational aggression and peer network health: Moderating effects of gender and antisocial behavior
3. Risky sexual behaviors and peer network health in urban African American adolescents

The presentations will be followed by a nationally recognized discussant to reflect on presentations strengths and challenges for prevention science.

The goals of this symposium are:

1. Demonstrate the methodology of assessing peer network health within primary care.
2. Highlight the moderating, mediating, and predictive role of peer network health.
3. Provide examples of a preventive application utilizing Peer Network Counseling.