Drew Today

The Researcher

A future psychologist examines family structure and teen drug use.

As a child in Camden, N.J., Jasmine Coleman saw the effects of substance abuse up close. “I grew up around a lot of it. It was something that was always there,” she says. “I chose not to do any of it. But I wondered, ‘How does seeing this affect other children? Will they be more or less likely to use drugs?’ ”

Last summer Coleman C’13, a psychology major, had a chance to research the topic as one of four undergraduates nationwide selected as interns at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. The program trains fledging social scientists in data access and methods of analysis.

Using data from a 2009 federal survey on drug use, Coleman studied how family structure affects the age at which adolescents start drinking and smoking marijuana. She discovered that whether, and how early, a child begins to use either drug correlates with whether he or she lives with one or two parents—and whether the child in the single-parent family is the same sex as the parent. For example, girls in female-headed households reported drinking alcohol earlier than girls in households headed by a male or two parents.

Coleman believes her findings have implications for drug-prevention programs: “The takeaway is that you should look not only at family structure, but also, in one-parent households, at the interplay between the sex of the child and the sex of the parent.” But her research has only just begun. Coleman, who would like to become a clinical child psychologist, plans to continue studying substance abuse in graduate school. “Drugs can put you in a very bad place, even at college,” she says. “Every other weekend, you hear about someone getting transported to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. It makes you wonder, ‘Why do they go overboard?’”—Mary Jo Patterson