Adolescent Health and Development in Context

Project:

Adolescent Health and Development in Context

Principal Investigator:

Christopher Browning (Sociology & CJRC)

Co-investigators:

Catherine Calder (Statistics & CJRC)
Elizabeth Cooksey (Sociology)
Mei-Po Kwan (Geography & CJRC)

Sponsor:

 National Institutes of Health: National Institute on Drug Abuse
William T. Grant Foundation

Abstract:

The data collection project is based on two grants. The NIH/NIDA grant is a $3.07 million grant to collect data on 4-5,000 youth ages 11-17 and their caregivers in Franklin County, OH. The study will gather a weeks worth of GPS data on the locations of youth activities and real-time information on mood, behavior, and social interaction using Smartphone-based assessments. The objective of the study is to understand how social contexts (including the social network, organizational, and geographic settings of routine activities) affect mental health and behavioral development during adolescence. We will also field a separate County-wide community survey asking a sample (N=~2,100) of adults questions about the social climate of their residential neighborhoods. The project will gather two waves of data on youth replicating the GPS/Smartphone protocol at wave 2. The WT Grant Foundation project is a $600,000 grant to supplement the NIH award. This project will oversample youth from a low-income region of Columbus in order to gather more precise information on how economically disadvantaged youth use their local community resources to promote successful development. This project will be the first, large-scale probability study to combine detailed, longitudinal information on the geographic locations of youth activities with real-time data on youth social interactions, mental health, and behavioral outcomes.