Project

SSDP-TIP – The Intergenerational Project

Project Description

The Seattle Social Development Project – The Intergenerational Project (SSDP-TIP) is an ongoing longitudinal study, started in 2000, of the children of the members of the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP) panel. SSDP-TIP is a theory-driven study, based on the Social Development Model, that examines the effects and mechanisms of action of parental and grandparental drug use on child development. The study examines the factors linking drug use across multiple generations in order to understand the effects of current and past parental and grandparental drug use on children’s development, behavior, and drug use initiation. Although funded by NIDA and centered around drug use, we crafted the design to be broader in its assessment package using a multi-informant (parent, child, teacher), multimodal (interview; parent-child observation; neurocognitive assessment; etc.), systems-oriented approach. We collected 7 waves of data from 383 families between 2002 and 2011. With the accelerated longitudinal design, included children spanned ages 1-22. This sample was followed up in 2015-2018 (new n = 426) to study the effects of cannabis legalization (see separate description).

When members of the SSDP panel were in elementary school, some of them received the Raising Healthy Children intervention, which included parent, teacher, and child training aimed at preventing substance use, increasing child social skills, and improving bonding to school. This intervention has yielded multiple, long-term benefits for SSDP participants who received it. Now that SSDP participants have children of their own, data from SSDP-TIP are being used to investigate whether the intervention received by parents when they were young may have benefits for their children. From 2021-2024, SSDP-TIP data will be used to investigate potential intergenerational benefits from the Raising Healthy Children intervention.