Departments
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Week of 8 October 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 9 |
Feature
Article
SSW research projects aim at the roots of substance abuse
By David J. Craig
As director of Centro Panamericano, a Lawrence social service agency, in the 1980s, Jorge Santiago (GRS'84) discovered that much of the alcohol and drug use that he saw among local adolescents was preventable. Teens who had a dysfunctional home life or whose parents used drugs seemed more likely to develop drug problems of their own. But because his agency didn't receive funding to counsel families, says Santiago, he was stymied.
More than a decade later, the tide is finally turning. Two research projects at the BU School of Social Work are seeking to identify factors that push young people to drugs and alcohol. Such research, Santiago believes, could convince policymakers that more money is needed for intervention programs. He'll help coordinate one of the projects, which will be based in Lawrence.
"Local and state lawmakers think counseling individuals who abuse drugs is enough," says Santiago, who now is assistant dean at Northern Essex Community College in Lawrence and a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. "But it's not. I expect this research might show that to prevent substance abuse you need to have a counseling network that includes entire families, so you can understand the pressures that make adolescents vulnerable."
Two teams of BU researchers are about to undertake what SSW faculty members say is the school's first in-depth research on alcohol and drug abuse among minority groups. The projects are funded by a $1.9 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health. SSW will receive the money over the next three years.
Melvin Delgado, an SSW professor, will focus on the role that alcohol and drugs play in the lives of Dominican and Puerto Rican gang members in Lawrence. The second project will be led by Joyce West Stevens, an SSW assistant professor, who will examine substance abuse among African-American women and their daughters in Boston. The NIDA grant also will fund a weeklong series of seminars on substance abuse prevention and intervention strategies at BU next June. Practitioners and scholars from around New England will be invited.
Delgado, who has taught at BU since 1979 and has studied such issues as social welfare policy, drug abuse, and gangs, will be hitting the streets of Lawrence in about eight months to get in touch with gang members. He and his researchers, including Santiago, aim to interview 75 gang members age 18 and older.
"We're going to look at what their daily lives are like and what role drugs play," Delgado says. "If drugs play a role, we want to know the best ways to prevent and treat the consumption. Or if there is a drug business that they're involved in, we want to know how to give them an alternative."
Because both Delgado and Santiago have ties to the Latino population in Lawrence, they are confident that gang members will talk frankly about the subject. They hope that in addition to informing drug treatment policy, the interviews will unravel myths that exist about gangs. Some people in inner-city communities, Delgado says, do not believe that gangs are involved in drugs.
"If in fact drugs are not an important part of gang life," he says, "we want the public to know."
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Melvin Delgado, an SSW
professor, and Joyce West Stevens, an SSW assistant
professor, were awarded a $1.9 million grant from
the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study
substance abuse among local minority populations.
Photo by Fred Sway
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"We're going to ask very open-ended questions to get the women to describe their experiences to us," Stevens says. "We'll ask them how they see themselves getting involved in drug use and about the conditions in which it happened."
Stevens' study is also important, she says, because alcohol and drug use among minority adolescents has risen dramatically during this decade, although they are still below the rates among white teens. The fact that mothers may pass on drug habits to their daughters is of particular interest, she says, because women play such an integral role in many inner-city minority families. However, Stevens also will try to discover how non-drug users in high-risk environments stay clear of drugs.
"There are resilient families in inner-city communities who know how to navigate their own environments and protect themselves," says Stevens. "So we want to find out what protective factors some people use, whether it be church or a role model within the family who has achieved upward mobility."
SSW faculty note that the NIDA-funded research will increase opportunities for students at BU to study substance abuse prevention, which is still a relatively new concept for most schools of social work.
"Students already come here to study substance abuse," says SSW Dean Wilma Peebles-Wilkins. "But what we've done in the past has been more program evaluation and needs assessment."
Santiago says the project will have long-term benefits for Lawrence as well. BU researchers plan to offer recommendations to that community's social service organizations for prevention work based on their findings at the end of the study, and will invite local practitioners to the substance abuse seminar series next year.
"We're going to be able to train case managers at local agencies to do a better job gathering information about their clients and train them to deal with data in an empirical way," says Santiago. "I expect that we'll be getting better information. The impact on Lawrence is going to be incredible."