VCU CICFS Receives NIH Grant to Understand the Social Lives of Teens Related to Substance Use and Mental Disorders

By Sathya Achia Abraham

Virginia Commonwealth University researchers will examine how a teenager’s network of friends, favorite hangouts and feelings and moods all interact to influence substance use.

The VCU Commonwealth Institute for Child and Family Studies received a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to collect data based on survey, real-time location and ecological momentary assessment – which is a method of repeatedly sampling a subject’s behavior and experience in real-time - during a two-year period in a sample of 300 urban adolescents. The VCU team has developed a highly contextually specific research approach that grounds social networks within the physical and social environment of adolescents’ lives.

“By studying adolescents’ social networks within the context of their routine locations or activity space for two years, we will be able to model the evolution of risk and protective mechanisms for substance use and mental disorders in great detail,” said principal investigator Michael Mason, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and director of the VCU Commonwealth Institute for Child and Family Studies.

“This detailed information will provide highly specific, culturally relevant and informative data for future preventive interventions,” he said.

Mason and colleagues will use ecological momentary assessment via mobile messaging technology to simultaneously assess situational contingencies including behaviors, emotions, evaluations, peers and locations on adolescent substance use in real time. By combining sampled-specific coordinate data of location with a series of standard surveys, the team will integrate the personal, social and environmental processes associated with initiation and escalation of substance use.

“This project is a great example of the translational research our VCU faculty members are doing,” said John Clore, M.D., director of the VCU Center for Clinical and Translational Research and professor in the Department of Internal Medicine in the VCU School of Medicine.

“The outcomes from this research will help teens in our community and beyond with preventative interventions for substance use, a key focus of VCU’s Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health.”

The Commonwealth Institute for Child and Family Studies is the research arm of the Virginia Treatment Center for Children at VCU. It is housed within the VCU Department of Psychiatry’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The Commonwealth Institute for Child and Family Studies provides research designed to improve the mental health of children, adolescents, and families.