Substance Abuse as a Cascade Model
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3625617/
What factors influence an individual to abuse cigarettes, marijuana, and alcohol? Is it possible to predict the risk of an individual abusing drugs given personalities, childhoods, academics, or social relationships? A group of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health attempted to address this topic by following 678 urban, primarily African American, youth from first grade through young adulthood (age 21). One notable finding was how an individual winds up in a “deviant” peer group (which often leads to anti-social behavior that is strongly correlated with substance abuse). The lack of adequate monitoring by parents in early adolescence and rejection from teachers and peers leads to an eventual “drift” into the deviant peer group. Within a deviant peer group, substance-abusing friends can quickly help spread their substance-abusing behavior. This behavior did not seem gender-specific, indicating a need for awareness programs in childhood as well as adolescence.
This research project relates to our learning of cascade models and thresholds in class. How each person relates to one another can be seen as a network with their behavior reflecting whether substance-abusing or not substance-abusing. It is interesting that a deviant friend group does not act as a cluster, as a substance-abusing friend in the deviant group can quickly spread the behavior to the rest. This indicates an especially low threshold q for this group of friends. A low threshold may be due to wanting to fit in, as the research noted that rejection often leads to joining the deviant friend group in the first place. Members that are not in the deviant peer group are less likely to abuse drugs, indicating that there may be: 1. a higher threshold q for drug abuse or 2. a greater number of edges/ties such that it is difficult for p to be greater than q. Overall, the application of a threshold cascade model to the Johns Hopkins researcher’s project is very interesting.