UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO RESEARCHERS SHARE IN MULTI- MILLION GRANT TO FIND LINKS BETWEEN RISKY BEHAVIOR AND FUTURE OUTCOMES
BUFFALO, NY and COLUMBIA, MO. Adolescents and young adults strive
to find and define themselves, fit in with their peers, explore their
world, and have fun. In an effort to do this, some teens and young adults
engage in risky behaviors such as drinking, using drugs, and having
unsafe sex. Researchers and policy makers are concerned when adolescents
and young adults take part in such behaviors and want to know how they
can identify these behaviors and intervene quickly. With the help of
a multi- million grant, researchers at the University at Buffalo and
the University of Missouri-Columbia are taking steps to find some answers.
Lynne Cooper, a University of Missouri professor of psychology, and Kurt Dermen, a senior scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions, have received a series of grants from the National Institutes of Health to study risk-taking behaviors during adolescence and young adulthood. Dermen and Cooper have been tracking a group of more than 2,000 young people for the past decade to determine what factors contribute to risk-taking during adolescence, and how such behaviors affect adjustment in adulthood. The latest grant, totaling nearly $3 million, funds a 3rd interview with all study participants, as well as a 4th and 5th interview with a subset of participants.
"We hope to find out where these people are now in their lives, and determine how decisions they made as teenagers have influenced their life paths," Cooper said. "For example, although many adolescents take risks, most of them change their behavior patterns as they grow older. An important focus of this study will be to identify sub-groups of individuals who do and don't change, and to determine how these sub-groups differ from each other. In this way, we can develop a better understanding of the meaning and function risk-taking serves for adolescents, and when or for whom taking risks is entirely dysfunctional."
Cooper began the study about 12 years ago with interviews of 2,052 teenagers living in Buffalo, New York. About five years later, 90 percent of these young people were re-interviewed. "At the time of the second interview, many of the participants were leaving home for the first time, beginning new relationships, and starting to work, " Cooper said. "We looked at their earlier involvement in risky behaviors to determine whether having engaged in these behaviors predicted their current life course. However, because involvement in many of these behaviors continues to increase well into the 20s, it was too soon to tell what the longer-term effects of these experiences would be. The additional funding we have just received is very important, because it will enable us to look at the influences of adolescent risk-taking on life course adjustment well into adulthood."
Once the data are collected and analyzed, Dermen and Cooper hope policy
makers and researchers will be able to use the research to better understand
why adolescents and young adults take risks, and how to intervene before
these behaviors become life-long patterns.