Published November 3, 2008, last updated on March 7, 2013 under Research News
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has awarded Duke University more than $6 million over five years to involve researchers from multiple disciplines in developing new approaches to substance use prevention.
With this new funding, the Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center, begun in 2003 with an initial NIDA grant, will support scholars in translating their knowledge about regulatory processes and peer influences into programs that thwart substance abuse and related problems in adolescents and young adults.
The Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center (TPRC), part of Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy, is one of only two NIDA prevention centers in the country; the Oregon Social Learning Center is the other. The principal investigators for the Duke TPRC are Philip Costanzo, professor of psychology and associate director of the Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP), and Kenneth Dodge, the William McDougall Professor of Public Policy Studies, professor of psychology and CCFP director.
According to Costanzo, the prevention centers are essential to developing effective and long-lasting prevention programs. Even efforts familiar to many people—such as the DARE program or public service announcements that declare “Just Say No” or present metaphoric images of “your brain on drugs”—have proven ineffective over time, he said.
“We may end up creating new ad campaigns or disseminating entire prevention programs to schools, complete with risk-assessment tools, but they will be evidence-based programs that we’ll test in the community,” Costanzo said.
The new Duke TPRC will involve about 20 researchers, mostly from Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including economists, epidemiologists, geneticists, health researchers, neuropharmacologists, neuroscientists, policy scholars, psychologists and sociologists. Together, they will conduct prevention-relevant research.
“Much of our work will look at the initiation of substance use and the influences on initiation,” Costanzo said. “Everyone knows that peers become more important during adolescence, but we will closely examine the changing roles of parents and peers, the neural developments that affect behavioral choices and self-regulation, the social settings in which youth function, the genetic vulnerabilities and the interaction of all these influences.”
Research supported by the TPRC over the past five years focused on multiple levels of social influence. Findings include evidence that sixth-graders who attend middle school are significantly more likely to encounter disciplinary problems than are sixth-graders who attend elementary school. This tendency for those who enter middle school in the sixth grade to engage in negative social behavior, including substance use, persists throughout high school.
Research also showed that preteens who use drugs gain popularity and are looked to as peer leaders, but that the same is not true for older teens who use drugs. Deviant peer influence, as the phenomenon is called, is strongest during the transition from elementary school to middle school, when students are 12 to 14 years old. This knowledge will be essential to the new research, Costanzo said.
“If we can figure out how to delay the age at which children and youth first use drugs, we will be able to positively affect the outcomes,” he said.
Substance abuse and addiction are costly outcomes, both socially and economically, to schools, neighborhoods and entire communities as well as individual families, Costanzo noted. Substance abuse contributes to the rates of school dropout, chronic unemployment, crime, violence and other societal ills.
“I believe that, over the next five years, we will find effective ways to regulate behaviors regarding substance abuse as we discover other sources of potential influence,” Costanzo said. “And I believe that there may be ways to extend what we learn to address other concerns, such as obesity and other processes involving human regulatory disruptions.”
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The TPRC represents a collaboration at Duke among the CCFP, the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and the Social Science Research Institute. Other Duke institutes, including the Institute for Brain Sciences, the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, and the Global Health Institute, are expected to become involved. Each entity will be critical to the success of the TPRC, Dodge said.
“The TPRC represents what is best about the intellectual climate at Duke: faculty members breaking down disciplinary boundaries to seek solutions to important problems in contemporary society,” Dodge said.
Costanzo and Dodge both noted the TPRC is a prime example of Duke’s commitment to “interdisciplinarity” and “knowledge in the service of society,” two themes central to the university’s strategic plan.
For more information on the CCFP, which is affiliated with the Social Science Research Institute and the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke, visit www.childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu.
This release originally published by the Duke Office of News & Communications.
