Institute Awards Grant to Johns Hopkins Researcher
The Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders at Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions has awarded an Incentive Grant of $23,000 to the John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in support of the study "Prevalence of gambling disorders: Association with drug use and psychiatric comorbidity in adolescents living in Baltimore." The objectives of the research project are to estimate the prevalence rate of gambling habits and disorders in a sample of 519 15- and 16-year-olds - 90 percent of whom are African-American - and examine the impact of parental monitoring, deviant peer relationships, and co-occurring psychiatric and addictive disorders on the gambling behaviors and disorders in the group. The research will fill a gap in the gambling field, which has produced few studies on minority adolescents.
The Incentive Grants were established in 2004 to stimulate and encourage young investigators to enter the field of gambling studies by providing "seed" funds for gambling research projects focused on vulnerable populations. Similar to career development awards offered by the National Institutes of Health, the Incentive Grants category was designed to foster a meaningful mentoring relationship between the young investigator and an experienced researcher. Applications for the Incentive Grants were reviewed by members of the Institute's program advisory board in June. The grant to Johns Hopkins will support the work of Silvia Martins, who received her doctorate in 2003. She will work closely with Howard Chilcoat, an associate professor in the department of mental health at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.
The adolescents in Martins' study constitute a sample that has been interviewed regularly since first grade as part of the ongoing Johns Hopkins Prevention Intervention Research Center's Second Generation Intervention Trial. This longitudinal project is testing the effectiveness of a classroom- and family-based intervention model focused on the early risk behaviors of poor achievement and aggressive and shy behavior and their correlates of antisocial behavior, substance abuse, and anxious and depressive symptoms. The project has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
