Longitudinal Impacts of Pandemic-Induced Disruptions on Adolescent Siblings' and Parents' Alcohol Use: A Family Life Course Perspective

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly disrupted the daily lives of adolescents and their families in the United States. Emergency school and community closures confined children and adults together in their homes with greatly limited access to other supportive adults and institutions. Adolescents' involvement in developmentally-normative contexts was interrupted. This crisis evolved into a chronic, relapsing and remitting state of life with intensities that varied dramatically between families and communities as well as across weeks, months, and now years. As such, there is a critical need to understand how these disruptions affected adolescents' and parents' short- and long-term health, and in particular, their alcohol and other substance use. The present study addresses this need through the combination of extant data analysis and prospective data collection. Rooted in life course developmental theory, we will explore the implications and developmental timing of pandemic-induced disruptions and stressors for adolescents' and parents' alcohol and other substance use in the ongoing accelerated longitudinal Parent and Adolescent Sibling Study (PASS). PASS includes 1364 adolescent siblings and their parents; adolescents ranged in age from 10 to 17 (grades 5-10) during the pre-pandemic period at Wave 1 (2019). Families in PASS provided/will provide survey data three times over two consecutive years during the pandemic (Wave 1.5, May-June 2020; Wave 2, Fall 2020; Wave 3, Fall 2021). With the proposed Wave 4 (Fall 2022), PASS's multi-wave (5 total assessments across four years), multi-family member longitudinal study will capture the entire arc of the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing the life course principle of linked lives, we will investigate the associations between multiple family members' alcohol and substance use patterns throughout the pandemic period. This focus on the family context is critical given its fundamental importance for youth's alcohol and other substance use was further amplified during shutdowns/restrictions as it has been the primary site in which pandemic stressors were experienced. Finally, we will identify risk and protective factors (both between-person and within-family) that moderate the influence of pandemic-related disruptions on youth's alcohol and other substance use patterns and trajectories. The aims will be tested using a structural equation (SEM) framework. This flexible analytic procedure is advantageous as it can model longitudinal data which are nested within individuals as well as data from siblings which are further nested within families. SEM permits modeling of individual differences in change patterns (including non-linear patterns), attributes those differences to both time-varying and time-invariant covariates, and efficiently accounts for missing data. Ultimately, understanding how adolescents and parents suffered, adapted, and coped with pandemic challenges is key for supporting recovery from this era, for understanding response to economic crises and natural disasters, and anticipating long-term trends in alcohol and other substance use among the current cohort of adolescents.