Healthy Passages: A Community-Based Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: University of Texas Prevention Research Center

Topics:
Healthy Youth

Chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer may result from unhealthy behaviors established during late childhood and adolescence, such as smoking and eating high-fat foods. Healthy Passages is a 10-year study to find out what individual, family, peer, and community factors influence risk behaviors among teens and pre-teens over time. The center’s researchers, community advisory group, and two collaborating centers (at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Alabama) identified three focus areas to research.

The primary focus is to determine what influences adolescents’ substance use, mental health, sexual behaviors, and school achievement. The secondary focus is to discover what factors contribute to adolescents’ eating habits and physical activity levels. A third focus is to determine whether race, ethnicity, gender, and household income affect young people’s behavior, health status, and school outcomes. How parents influence children’s health-related behavior is also being examined so that appropriate parenting interventions can be explored, such as teaching parents how to communicate effectively with their children and influence their health-related behavior, and help ensure they stay in school.

The 10-year study, which started January 2004, involves collecting data every other year from about 5,250 fifth-grade students (and their primary caregivers) from the time the students are 10 years of age. Student participants are from about 75 schools in Houston, Los Angeles, and Birmingham, so that an equal number of African American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic white students are represented. Primary caregivers will complete surveys about their own health status and parenting styles as well as their children’s behavior. Teachers and school principals will complete surveys about their school’s environment. Researchers are also designing a follow-up project to collect data from participants every 3–5 years starting at age 23. Initial and follow-up data will allow researchers to analyze changes in student behavior and the factors that influence their behavior over time, and to compare these behaviors to participants’ health outcomes.

 

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