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UD prof receives NIH early career award
2:27 p.m., July 21, 2006--One in four U.S. children lives in a family where alcohol and/or drug abuse affect their daily lives. Parental substance abuse puts them at increased risk of physical illness, emotional disturbances, behavior problems, lower educational performance and susceptibility to addiction, according to the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information (NCADI). Christine Ohannessian, UD assistant professor of individual and family studies, has been examining adolescent development since she received her doctorate in human development and family studies from Pennsylvania State University in 1992. But, over the years, her work has focused on how parental alcohol and drug addiction affects teenagers, and last year, she received a $679,000 Early Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to conduct a five-year study to examine factors that may protect adolescents who have substance-abusing parents. “We're interested in a variety of psychosocial variables that could moderate the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent adjustment. For example, if these young people are involved in music and sports are they better able to cope? Does having a positive relationship with a sibling act as a protective factor?” Ohannessian said. Ohannessian and her graduate students initiated the study in 2005, compiling the survey and selecting the families she would be following for the next four years They are tracking 400 teens and their parents through questionnaires administered this spring and summer. “We're going into five high schools in Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania collecting survey data from 9th- and 10th-graders,” Ohannessian said. The questionnaires are designed to assess parental substance abuse and identify psychological problems such as depression and anxiety along with identifying coping techniques, family functioning, school involvement and a variety of psychosocial variables that, in theory, moderate the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent adjustment.
The 400 families being studied are volunteers, so the sample is extremely diverse, and families have a wide range of characteristics. “It's a community sample, not a clinical sample,” Ohanessian said. “What is most exciting about this study is that we will be able to look at the data and predict things that will happen over time. Ideally, I want to follow the adolescents into adulthood, especially early adulthood, from after high school to work or through college to see what happens to them,” she said. The data from study will be analyzed and used as a foundation for a larger, more extensive, long-term longitudinal investigation designed to examine the underlying processes involved in the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent psychological adjustment, Ohannessian said. Ohannessian joined the UD faculty in 2004. She previously was a post-doctoral fellow in psychiatry at the University of Connecticut and an assistant professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas and in the psychiatry department at the University of Connecticut Medical School. She also served as a biostatistician and as the interim director of biostatistics in the General Clinical Research Center at the University of Connecticut Medical School. Ohannessian has written or co-authored more than 30 scholarly papers on adolescent development, specializing in family dynamics where one or more parents in the family was addicted to alcohol or drugs. Article by Barbara Garrison
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