Life-Paths, Substance Use and Transition to Adulthood

Ley A. Killeya-Jones, Ph.D.
Fellow

Philip R. Costanzo, Ph.D. ( Duke University )
Faculty Preceptors

Dr. Killeya-Jones has received a three-year (2005-2008) Ruth L. Kirschstein - National Research Service Award (F32) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This training award provides support for the fellow to engage in mentored research and training activities with the goal of becoming a productive, independent investigator.

Dr. Killeya-Jones' training program will include courses at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill on the life-course, adolescence and the transition to adulthood, and longitudinal methods and data analysis. She will also develop and execute an empirical study that examines the relationship between early transitions to adult roles and young adult adjustment.

The empirical research study is theoretically grounded in developmental life course theory, which is predicated on a number of principles, including examination of social trajectories, life transitions, turning points, and linked lives (Elder & Johnson, 2002), and posits that “development is (at least to some extent) historically and culturally contingent and that adaptation takes different forms depending on the social context” (Colby, 1998, p. ix).

Moreover, this paradigm places great importance on the timing of transitions for healthy development. Whereas there may be a set of normative transitions that characterize the transition to adulthood, and indeed, even a normative progression, there is great variability in the paths taken or even open to adolescents, dependent upon not only their personal and familial characteristics and circumstances (Shanahan, 2000) but also demographic factors, including class, gender and race/ethnicity (George, 1993), and prevailing cultural, social, and economic events and forces (Elder, 1994; Wallace, 1999). However, experiencing these transitions too early can have far-reaching, negative effects on development and the life-course.  

The study takes a person-centered approach within the life-course paradigm to identify relationships between transitions into adult roles during adolescence and substance use trajectories through the young adult years. The study uses data from the first and third waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a study designed to assess the mental and physical health status of adolescents and explore the effects of multiple contexts in which they live on their health-related behaviors (Bearman, Jones & Udry, 1997).

Specific Aims:

1) To construct meaningful profiles or life-path groups of adolescents with and without precocious transitions to adult roles.

2) To examine the personal, social and contextual factors that predict membership in life-path groups.

3) To examine the impact of the socio-cultural context on the life-paths of adolescents in the transition to adulthood.

These aims will be achieved through secondary analysis of the Add Health data set, including application of latent class analysis to derive life-path groups in two cohorts, and logistic and least squares regression models, to predict membership in the groups and to predict outcomes in young adulthood, respectively. An important goal of the present research is to understand the impact of variable life-paths on the trajectory of substance use in the transition to adulthood. This aim is specifically concerned with the principle of contextual influences on life course development and is designed in part to assess whether ethnic/racial differences in substance use trajectories can be explained using contextual variables. In the present study, context is defined in two ways: at the subjective level, in terms of the individual's perceptions of social cohesion and attachment to the neighborhood, and at the objective level, in terms of poverty status, population characteristics, and labor force indicators.