Youth, Families and Addiction
2026-2027 Speaker Series and Learning Community
Problematic substance use and disorders are a devastating public health concern across the lifespan leading to a high burden of disease, injury, premature mortality, and economic costs. Risk for and consequences of substance use are particularly high among youth, as youth are especially vulnerable to the neurobiological and social consequences of substance use. Early and more extensive substance use in youth can also have long-lasting repercussions into adulthood. For example, beginning to use substances before age 15 or engaging in polysubstance use in youth both predict problematic substance use later in life. For this reason, understanding substance use and related problems in youth serves to address the larger waves of drug epidemics that continue to impact the world, the US, and even North Carolina.
We believe that two key issues will help us advance this field and better inform prevention and intervention efforts, known to be plagued by high rates of relapse and drop out. First, we seek to understand risk and protective factors related to problematic substance that are common across youth and those that are unique within important subgroups of youth. Second, nuanced questions about development processes, complex causal mechanisms, and subgroup differences are well-suited to newly emerging methodological designs and statistical analyses that are just beginning to be used in this field. Exploring strengths and limitations among current approaches will allow for the development of a more systematic approach to examining individual differences in risk for substance use among youth.
The seminar will involve 7-8 meetings throughout the academic year that include a mixture of speakers (like in a traditional seminar platform), linked academic-community partner presentations (like in an interview platform), and skills-based sessions (like in a workshop platform – particularly in Year 2). In addition, this problem-focused seminar will produce two manuscripts authored by the PI and seminar collaborators who express interest (not required!). The audience will be multidisciplinary, including students and faculty at UNC-CH (e.g., psychology, exercise science, social work, school of education, psychiatry, and public health) and colleagues from other institutions connected with the PI through prior inter-institutional collaborative networks (e.g., the Center for Developmental Science, the Care-to-Share Carolina Seminar) that include UNC G, Elon, WFU, and Duke. Additionally, we will invite community stakeholders to attend and present at seminar events.
Seminar objectives:
- To build a network of scholars within the Triangle/Triad focused on the problem of youth substance use and disorder
- To identify individual differences in risk and protective factors for substance use among specific subgroups of at-risk youth
- To identify and provide introductory training in newly emerging research designs and statistical analyses well-suited to this conceptual framework
- To integrate findings into two publications.
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