NIH Awards NYU Silver Professors Two-Year Grant to Study Adolescent Alcohol Use Along U.S.-Mexico Border

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has awarded Professors Vincent Guilamo-Ramos (principal investigator) and James Jaccard and Joe Gonzalez of Behavioral Health Solutions of South Texas a two-year, $363,400 grant to examine adolescent alcohol use along the U.S.-Mexican border. The National Institutes of Health Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant will allow the researchers to study a region that has been particularly vulnerable to alcohol use but neglected in alcohol prevention efforts.

The project examines how recent economic transitions, governmental policies, and social and familial processes shape Mexican adolescent vulnerability to alcohol use and related risk behaviors, utilizing an integrated micro- and macro-level framework to understand alcohol consumption among adolescents residing along the U.S. Mexico border. The research will be conducted in border counties that include highly impoverished and isolated communities known as colonias, where many families lack access to basic social and health services.

The long-term goal of the research is to inform alcohol interventions targeting border youth and increase understanding of how transitional contextual processes influence risk behaviors in the current global environment of potential financial crises and destabilizing political events.