The bioecological model views the individual as existing in, and in many respects as the product of, a series of nested environments or systems, each contained within the next. Using this model, the initiation of substance use and the progression to impairing substance use is seen as the result of complex interactions between the individual (personality, genetic vulnerability, regulatory processes, endocrine function etc.), their family (parenting, marital relations), and their community (school, neighborhood).

The goal of this pilot project is to add data from the North Carolina Education Research Center (NCERC) to the Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS), a longitudinal study of the development of substance use disorders (SUD) and psychiatric comorbidity in a representative sample of 1,420 youth, including 350 American Indians. The NCERC houses extensive information on districts, schools, teachers and student functioning within the school environment, for all local education agencies in North Carolina. This will allow us to test a full bioecological model for the development of substance problems. The two outcomes of interest will be: initiation of substance use (dated by reports of onset); and progression, defined as movement from use of any substance to frequent/impairing use.
The project involves: (1) generating a list of data from the GSMS data base that can be used to match participants onto the NCERC data base; (2) carry out the matching; (3) examine the educational characteristics of youth who develop SUD; and (4) examine the characteristics of the schools that these youth attended.

Step 1: Completed by January 5, 2010

Step 2: Matching has been completed. Link rates varied by age cohort. The overall link rate is 68%. The rates by age cohort are:

Youngest cohort (born 1984): 78% linked
Middle cohort (born 1982): 67% linked
Oldest cohort (born 1980):  56% linked

Steps 3 and 4:

1. Preliminary analyses showed that although satisfactory numbers of GSMS participants in each cohort could be linked, there were relatively small amounts of data available on the older two cohorts. This is because the children were in age groups on which the State had not yet begun to collect data systematically. At a meeting of Beth Gifford, Jane Costello, and Bill Copeland on March 3, 2010 a decision was made to concentrate on the youngest as having more detailed data in the NCERC data base.
2. Dimitri Putilin, a graduate student in Clinical Psychology, was hired at the end of March 2010 to help the NCERC  statistician You Bai with the substantive areas of the data analysis.