Bridging the Gap: Research Informing Practice for Healthy Youth Behavior (No. 1)

Three interdependent projects designed to monitor trends in youth substance use and abuse as well as in the state and community level environmental factors affecting youth alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use will be directed and integrated. The ultimate aim of these projects is to use the data to be collected and analyzed to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of alternative strategies in reducing youth ATOD use and abuse. The key aspects of this project are:

• The development/enhancement of three detailed, comparable state level databases - one each for alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs - containing information on policies and other factors related to use, measures of use and abuse, and measures of the harms associated with use and abuse for the 50 states of the U.S. and the District of Columbia.
• The identification and critical review of community level databases containing information on the determinants of use, use and abuse, and the harms associated with alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use, and the construction of detailed community level databases on these factors for the communities contained in the Monitoring the Future Surveys (MTFS).
• The collection of detailed, community-level data on the environment related to ATOD in the MTFS national survey and "rapid response" communities.
• Liaison with the Institute for Social Research with respect to the enhancement of the MTFS and the conduct of surveys in the "rapid response" communities.
• The analysis of the community level and merged state, community, and enhanced-MTFS databases.
• The dissemination of the products from these analyses.