The NC Life Study

ORIGINS, CHALLENGES, FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Outline

• Background: the Context study
• The NC Life Study
• Recruitment challenges
• Current research projects:
• Interracial violence in schools
• The spatial scale of structural racism and discrimination
• Lessons learned

Background: �The Context of Adolescent Substance Use Study

• Susan Ennett, PI: initially proposed R01 doing secondary analysis of AddHealth, rejected
• Received R01 for new data collection, largely modeled on AddHealth
• Data collection every 6 months starting in Spring of 2002 through wave 6 in Fall of 2004, plus one-year followup in Fall 2005 (7 waves)
• Sample: all 6th, 7^th, and 8^th graders attending public school in three NC counties
• Total eligible: 8,201
• Total participants: 7,173
• New cohort entrants included
• Random parent subsample of >1,000 parents

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Topic areas (# items)

• Substance use
• Anticipated use (6)
• Current & Lifetime use (20)
• Alcohol & nicotine dependence (12)
• Alcohol & nicotine motives for use (6)
• Alcohol consequences (5)
• Parent & Sibling Use
• Perceived Peer use (6)
• Delinquency (15)

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• School attachment (3)
• Extracurricular activities (6)
• Academic performance (4)
• Religious life (3)
• Conventional beliefs (3)
• Values / goals (6)
• Body image (3)
• Pubertal development (9)
• Home life / parents / siblings (63)
• Neighborhood characteristics (9)
• Residential Geocodes

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• Mental health
• Anxiety (10)
• Depression (3)
• Suicide (3)
• Anger (3)
• Thrill seeking (3)
• Peer Violence
• perpetration & victimization (12)
• Dating Violence (30)

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Friendship Networks

• Name up to five of your best friends
• Relationship characteristics:
• Interaction frequency (been to each other’s homes, hung out outside school)
• Parental closure (met each other’s parents, parents met each other)
• Emotional closeness

Aggression Networks

• Name up to five students who “picked on you or were mean to you” in past three months
• Name up to five students you “picked on or were mean to” in past three months
• Instructed to disregard friendly teasing and only consider serious acts of cruelty
• Type of aggression: (verbal abuse, indirect aggression, physical violence)
• Frequency
• Networks combined such that A 🡪 B if A nominated B as a victim or B nominated A as a bully

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Context research

• ~$12m in grants (CDC, NIH, NSF)
• ~50 papers
• Rich data
• But it is getting old

The NC Life Study

The NC Life Study

• 20 year followup to Context; participants now in mid- to late-30’s
• R01 funded by NIDA program on Structural Racism and Discrimination. MPIs Tamara Taggart (GWU / Rutgers) and Nisha Gottfredson (UNC / RTI)
• Funded new wave (wave 8) of data collection from Context participants to understand short and long-term effects of exposure to structural racism during adolescence

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Study Team

Nisha O’Shea, PhD

MPI

Tamara Taggart, PhD

MPI

Bob Faris, PhD

Co-I

Dorothy Espelage, PhD

Co-I

John Hipp, PhD

Co-I

Marina Pearsall

Project Manager

Liann Tucker, PhD

Researcher

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Alberto Valido, PhD

Researcher

Emily Hutchens

PhD candidate

Connor Mitchell

PhD candidate

New Data: Wave 8 online survey topics (#items)

• Neighborhood cohesion & efficacy (16)
• Religious life (14)
• Demographics (21)
• Children (3)
• Addresses, past and present (4)
• Education and employment (4)
• Income (2)
• Substance use (32)
• Mental health (7)

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• Physical health (10)
• Family history (11)
• Pregnancies (16)
• Health care access (6)
• HIV (13)
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (8)
• Discrimination experiences (11)
• Intimate Partner Violence (4)

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Wave 8 network items

• Below are people you listed as friends while you were in high school. Are you still friends? (Yes, still friends / No, we’re no longer friends / I don’t remember this person)
• If no, falling out follow-up questions
• Romantic relationships during HS, with HS classmates after HS
• Bullying—name HS classmates who were mean to you or picked on you; who you were mean to or picked on
• Current egonetwork data; name people you feel closest to outside the household
• Category (friend/neighbor/relative/classmate/coworker
• How long known
• Demographics (age, gender, race, education, employment
• Criminal justice history

Recruitment

Four Domains for Successful Panel Retention: �

• Tracing
• Collecting contact information for subjects, plus family members
• Barrier reduction
• Flexibility in data collection, language interpretation/translation, etc.
• Community building
• Study logo, website, newsletters, birthday gifts, study participant meetups
• Conveying significance of study research
• Follow-up/reminders
• Multiple forms of communication (text, calls, letters); gift cards/vouchers

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S. Teague, G.J. Youssef, J.A. Macdonald, E. Sciberras, A. Shatte, M. Fuller- Tyszkiewicz, et al., Retention strategies in longitudinal cohort studies: a systematic review and meta-analysis, BMC Med. Res. Methodol. 18 (1) (2018) 151."

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Four Domains for Successful Panel Retention: �

• Tracing
• Collecting contact information for subjects, plus family members
• Barrier reduction
• Flexibility in data collection, language interpretation/translation, etc.
• Community building
• Study logo, website, newsletters, birthday gifts, study participant meetups
• Conveying significance of study research
• Follow-up/reminders
• Multiple forms of communication (text, calls, letters); gift cards/vouchers

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S. Teague, G.J. Youssef, J.A. Macdonald, E. Sciberras, A. Shatte, M. Fuller- Tyszkiewicz, et al., Retention strategies in longitudinal cohort studies: a systematic review and meta-analysis, BMC Med. Res. Methodol. 18 (1) (2018) 151."

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Tracing

• Army of volunteer RAs successfully traced 7,533 (92%) of 8,201 eligibles (93% of participants)
• 68% with medium to high confidence (subsequent verification in survey)
• Majority never left NC, ~ 2/3^rd reside in or near the original counties
• 668 could not be traced, despite having full names, addresses, etc.
• Who disappeared from public view?
• Controlling for name frequency, disproportionately Latinx youth (followed by White youth) with lower indegree and who did not participate in many survey waves. Residential moves increased risk
• More frequently resided in less rural, less poor block groups

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Survey participation

Approach

• Offered $50 gift card incentive, plus incentives for referrals
• Website, with screener
• Texting, calling, postcards, social media ads, spotify ads, radio ads
• 69% have received direct phone calls, all have received postcards
• Postcards also sent to parents of subjects
• Flyers posted in communities
• In-person networking at community hubs
• Hospitals, clinics, churches, schools, football games, community events
• Community ambassadors program
• Participation by tracing confidence score:
• 4: 13%
• 3: 11%
• 2: 9%
• 1: 4%
• 0: 7%

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• Virtually no respondents came from ads, passive outreach
• Email, texts, calls, in-person
• Only 11% response rate
• Fortunately, we have other data…

Administrative Records & �Archival Data

• Complete individual-level school records from NC Educational Research Data Center
• Transcripts, test scores, disciplinary records
• Expanded geocoded neighborhood data for all known addresses
• Multi-dimensional measures of SRD at block group level & higher
• Criminal justice contact histories
• Arrests (NC), convictions, sentences etc.
• Other public records
• Yearbooks
• Photos, extracurriculars, status indicators

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Current Research

INTERRACIAL VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS

Interracial Violence in Schools� Faris, Tucker, Forest-Hutchens, Espelage, Hipp, Gottfredson, and Taggart

• Is interracial violence more or less likely than intraracial violence after accounting for exposure?
• Is interracial violence and aggression more consequential for victims than intraracial victimization?
• Internalizing problems
• Substance abuse
• School attachment
• GPA changes
• 10 school networks, n ~100 to 1,000

No strong patterns of mixed race dyads * social distance

Mixed race friendships, however…

Consequences

• Fixed effects models with decomposed aggression indegree (by aggressor race, gender, and social distance)
• Net of intraracial victimization, interracial victimization generally has no significant pernicious effect on internalizing problems, substance abuse, or school attachment for either Black or White students.
• Only two significant effects of interracial victimization: 1) Black and White youth distressed by bullying from Latinx and other racial groups; 2) White youth experience GPA decline after bullying by Black schoolmates
• Decomposed by gender & social distance

Interracial Violence

• Paradoxical results:
• Interracial aggression (and physical violence) is: a) highly unlikely, even after accounting for social distance; and b) largely inconsequential
• Partly anticipated by Gould’s arguments about collective conflicts

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Consequences

Consequences

Current Research

MEASURING THE SPATIAL SCALE OF STRUCTURAL RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION: CONSEQUENCES FOR LIFE EXPECTANCY

Measuring the spatial scale of structural racism and discrimination: Consequences for estimated life expectancy�

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• John R. Hipp*
• Yuqing Wang
• Nisha Gottfredson O’Shea
• Robert W. Faris
• Dorothy L. Espelage
• Alberto Valido
• Tamara Taggart

Measures of SRD

Lessons learned

• Don’t wait twenty years
• Don’t try to call people for a survey in a swing state during an election cycle
• Don’t waste money on social media ads, consultants
• Get community leaders involved directly
• Be prepared for fraud:
• Screener stage—fraudulent enrollment, bots
• Survey stage—made it through screener but answered test questions incorrectly
• Thank goodness for NC Records
• Reach out with ideas for collaboration!
• Reconsider ”old” data

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Extra slides

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Context Research: Grants & Pubs

• NIH (National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities): A community driven modeling approach for identifying community & policy-level interventions to address the impact of structural racism and discrimination on adolescent substance use and mental health (R01 MD019763) 7/1/2024 – 6/30/2029. PI Tamara Taggart. Amount Awarded $3,589,223 (Direct)
• NIH (National Institute on Drug Abuse): Measuring the impact of structural racism and discrimination during adolescence on substance use, psychological distress, and criminal justice outcomes in adulthood (R01 DA056264-01) 5/15/2022 – 2/28/2026. MPI: Nisha Gottfredson and Tamara Taggart. Amount Awarded: $2,612,515
• NSF: “BIGDATA F: Critical Visualization Technologies for Analyzing and Understanding Big Network Data: (Award #1741536) 9/1/2017 – 8/31/2020 PI: Kwan-Liu Ma. Amount Awarded: $560,000
• NIH (National Institute on Drug Abuse): Peer Mechanisms in the Internalizing Pathway to Substance Abuse (1R01DA037215) 9/15/2014 – 9/31/2017 PI: Andrea Hussong. Amount Awarded: $689,930
• UC Davis Research Investments in the Sciences and Engineering Grant: Center of Excellence for Visualization 7/1/2012 – 7/1/2015. PI: Kwan-Liu Ma) Amount Awarded: $550,000

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Bauman, K. E., Faris, R., Ennett, S. T., Hussong, A., & Foshee, V. A. (2007). Adding valued data to social network measures: Does it add to associations with adolescent substance use? Social Networks, 29(1), 1–10.

Chang, L.-Y., Foshee, V. A., Reyes, H. L. M., Ennett, S. T., & Halpern, C. T. (2015). Direct and indirect effects of neighborhood characteristics on the perpetration of dating violence across adolescence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 44(3), 727–744. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0190-z

Cole, V. T., Hussong, A. M., McNeish, D. M., Ennett, S. T., Rothenberg, W. A., Gottfredson, N. C., & Faris, R. W. (2022). The role of social position within peer groups in distress-motivated smoking among adolescents. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 83(3), 420–429.

Cole, V. T., Hussong, A. M., Faris, R. W., Rothenberg, W. A., Gottfredson, N. C., & Ennett, S. T. (2020). A latent variable approach to measuring social dynamics in adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 30(1), 238–254.

Eastman, M., Foshee, V. A., Ennett, S. T., Sotres-Alvarez, D., McNaughton Reyes, H. L., Faris, R., & North, K. (2018). Profiles of internalizing and externalizing symptoms associated with bullying victimization. Journal of Adolescence, 65, 101–110.

Ennett, S. T., Bauman, K. E., Hussong, A., Faris, R., Foshee, V. A., Cai, L., & DuRant, R. H. (2006). The peer context of adolescent substance use: Findings from social network analysis. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 16(2), 159–186. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2006.00127.x

Ennett, S. T., Faris, R. W., Hipp, J., Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Hussong, A., & Cai, L. (2008). Peer smoking, other peer attributes, and adolescent cigarette smoking: A social network analysis. Prevention Science, 9(2), 88–98.

Ennett, S. T., Faris, R. W., Hussong, A. M., Gottfredson, N., & Cole, V. (2018). Depressive symptomology as a moderator of friend selection and influence on substance use involvement: Estimates from grades 6 to 12 in six longitudinal school-based social networks. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 47(11), 2337–2352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0915-5

Ennett, S. T., Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Hussong, A., Faris, R., Hipp, J., & Cai, L. (2010). A social contextual analysis of youth cigarette smoking development. Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 12(9), 950–962.

Ennett, S. T., Foshee, V. A., Bauman, K. E., Hussong, A., Faris, R., Hipp, J., Cai, L., DuRant, R. H., & Reyes, H. L. (2008). The social ecology of adolescent alcohol misuse. Child Development, 79(6), 1777–1791.

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Faris, R. (2012). Aggression, exclusivity, and status attainment in interpersonal networks. Social Forces, 90(4), 1207–1235.

Faris, R., & Ennett, S. T. (2012). Adolescent aggression: The role of peer group status motives, peer aggression, and group characteristics. Social Networks, 34(4), 371–378.

Faris, R., & Felmlee, D. (2011). Status struggles: Network centrality and gender segregation in same- and cross-gender aggression. American Sociological Review, 76(1), 48–73.

Faris, R., & Felmlee, D. (2014). Casualties of social combat: School networks of peer victimization and their consequences. American Sociological Review, 79(2), 228–257.

Faris, R., Felmlee, D., & McMillan, C. (2020). With friends like these: Aggression from amity and equivalence. American Journal of Sociology, 126(3), 673–713.

Felmlee, D., & Faris, R. (2016). Toxic ties: Networks of friendship, dating, and cyber victimization. Social Psychology Quarterly, 79(3), 243–262.

Foshee, V. A., Benefield, T. S., McNaughton Reyes, H. L., Eastman, M., Vivolo-Kantor, A. M., Basile, K. C., Ennett, S. T., & Faris, R. (2016). Examining explanations for the link between bullying perpetration and physical dating violence perpetration: Do they vary by bullying victimization? Aggressive Behavior, 42(1), 66–81. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21606

Foshee, V. A., Benefield, T. S., McNaughton Reyes, H. L., Ennett, S. T., Faris, R., Chang, L.-Y., Hussong, A., & Suchindran, C. M. (2013). The peer context and the development of the perpetration of adolescent dating violence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 42(4), 471–486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-013-9915-7

Foshee, V. A., McNaughton Reyes, H. L., Ennett, S. T., Suchindran, C., Mathias, J. P., Karriker-Jaffe, K. J., Bauman, K. E., & Benefield, T. S. (2011). Risk and protective factors distinguishing profiles of adolescent peer and dating violence perpetration. Journal of Adolescent Health, 48(4), 344–350. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2010.07.030

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Foshee, V. A., Reyes, H. L. M., Vivolo-Kantor, A. M., Basile, K. C., Chang, L.-Y., Faris, R., & Ennett, S. T. (2014). Bullying as a longitudinal predictor of adolescent dating violence. Journal of Adolescent Health, 55(3), 439–444.

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Hussong, A. M., Ennett, S. T., McNeish, D. M., Cole, V. T., Gottfredson, N. C., Rothenberg, W. A., & Faris, R. W. (2020). Social network isolation mediates associations between risky symptoms and substance use in the high school transition. Development and Psychopathology, 32(2), 615–630. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457941900049X

Hussong, A. M., Ennett, S. T., McNeish, D., Rothenberg, W. A., Cole, V., Gottfredson, N. C., & Faris, R. W. (2018). Teen social networks and depressive symptoms-substance use associations: Developmental and demographic variation. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 79(5), 770–780.

Muelder, C. W., Crnovrsanin, T., Faris, R., Felmlee, D., & Ma, K.-L. (2014). Visualization techniques for categorical analysis of social networks with multiple edge sets. Social Networks, 37, 56–64.

Reyes, H. L. M., Foshee, V. A., Markiewitz, N., Chen, M. S., & Ennett, S. T. (2018). Contextual risk profiles and trajectories of adolescent dating violence perpetration. Prevention Science, 19(8), 997–1007. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-018-0896-3

Reyes, H. L. M., Foshee, V. A., Tharp, A. T., Ennett, S. T., & Bauer, D. J. (2015). Substance use and physical dating violence. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 49(3), 467–475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2015.05.018

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