Adolescent Social Risks and Resources and Young Adult Health

Univ Of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY The substantial social and developmental changes of adolescence make it a period laden with social risks. Adolescents often do not have the cognitive capacities and emotional maturity to effectively cope on their own. Consequently, they must draw on others for help. Building on theoretical and practical knowledge of life course processes and later life implications of early social risk, understanding how and why adolescents accumulate risk over the long term or utilize resources in their social lives to recover from risk in the short term can potentially provide key theoretical insights into risk and resilience. The specific aims of the project are to: (1) identify adolescents who recover from early social risks to become healthy adults and those who follow a pattern of accumulating risks through young adulthood that undermine their adult health; (2) investigate complex biological processes associated with adolescents' health responses to social risks and resources; and (3) examine racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in longitudinal linkages among social risks, resources, and health. To accomplish these aims, this project will apply advanced statistical techniques to long-term longitudinal data inside and outside the body from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). The project will exploit the rich multi- method data collection in Add Health (e.g., surveys, networks, transcripts, biomarkers) and build on some of the most innovative uses of Add Health data (e.g., measuring course sequences with transcripts and examining early-life precursors to disease). The results of this research can identify adolescents who are most vulnerable to the cumulative effects of social risk. It may also inform programmatic efforts to reduce the immediate risks to mortality during the adolescent years, which are of such great concern, and to break the translation of early disadvantages into long-term mental and physical problems, which is increasingly seen as crucial to promoting adult health. The fellowship period includes activities and training to support the development of extant skills and building of new ones (e.g., conceptualization and operationalization of biosocial processes, life course frameworks and methods, longitudinal modeling, statistical approaches to the genome). The three fellowship years will include formal and informal mentoring, training in specific methodological and theoretical approaches (particularly as related to integrating biological and social pathways to health), and support in professionalization and networking. By engaging in the training plan proposed, the applicant will be well-suited for a productive career as a faculty member at a top-tier research institution.