Comprehensive Investigation of the Role of the Individuals, the Immediate Social Environment, and Neighborhoods in Trajectories of Adolescent Antisocial Behavior, Executive Report.

摘要

Adolescent substance use and delinquency are important public health concerns as they possess the possibility of severe consequences for the youth involved and society more broadly (Albert & Steinberg, 2011; Cohen & Piquero, 2009). Understanding developmental patterns and possible influences on those patterns is important in developing insights on prevention strategy targeted at these behaviors. The desire to understand and prevent long-term patterns of antisocial behavior first led to the compilation of comprehensive lists of risk factors found to increase the likelihood of antisocial behavior and, more recently, has prompted linkage of those risk factors to underlying causal processes. This approach, which draws on the study of individuals over time in explaining behavior, sets the stage for the development of interventions that are informed by an understanding of the onset and continuance of antisocial behavior (Loeber & Farrington, 2000). The current study draws on the literature relating individual constitutional factors, family influences and adolescent peer associations to substance use and delinquency. It also recognizes the emerging literature relating community social environment and processes to youth development. A launch perspective is used to relate these factors to the onset point of the developmental trend and its stability and/or change from that level in the latent growth curve analyses used in this study.