Child and adolescent predictors of youth alcohol use to intoxication

While youthful experimentation with alcohol is often tolerated and even condoned by many segments of society, there may be serious implications when the onset of drinking occurs at a young age. There is evidence that the earlier in life youth drink alcohol for the first time, the greater their risk is for impeding their brain's healthy development, being implicated in a serious injury, having a traumatic experience, or eventually suffering from a diagnosable alcohol or drug use disorder. The risk of these adversities is even greater when alcohol is consumed to the point of intoxication. In spite of this well recognized fact, however, very few studies of youth drinking have focused specifically on intoxication as a study outcome. Furthermore, while the association between peer-affiliation and youthful alcohol and drug use is well established in the literature, very few alcohol-use studies have investigated the role of peers or other contextual factors in adolescence with adjustment for early childhood markers of increased susceptibility.; The overarching purpose of this dissertation research was therefore to estimate the extent to which intoxicated drinking in adolescence is a function of characteristics in early childhood and the evolving risk factors in adolescents' more immediate social worlds. In fact while the literature supports both routes to substance use and abuse, no studies have prospectively investigated drinking to intoxication as a function of both childhood and adolescent characteristics that are known or suspected to increase risk.; This research project drew upon data from the second generation of the ongoing and longitudinal Johns Hopkins University Prevention Intervention Research Center (JHU-PIRC) randomized field trial of two first-grade preventive interventions. Study participants in this second generation consisted of one cohort of first graders representing nine different schools in Baltimore Maryland. These young study participants were randomly assigned to one of three first grade classroom conditions within each school and tracked annually up through the end of the ninth grade school year, their first year of high school. In addition to a range of appropriate univariate and bivariate descriptive statistics, the data were analyzed using the generalized estimating equations (GEE) extension of logistic regression analysis for binary response data collected at multiple time points. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...