Main Content
Pregnancy is a key opportunity to affect the epidemiology and to enhance reduction of women’s tobacco and problem alcohol use. The opportunities to provide pregnant women with tobacco and alcohol cessation resources appear to be strongest when integrated into community-based health services, with attention to generating support in mothers’ networks of family and friends. With support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this secondary data analyses project investigates the role of neighborhood structural aspects and social processes in association with maternal alcohol and tobacco use in the perinatal and early childhood parenting periods.
The Birth Cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey dataset is augmented by constructs of neighborhood socioeconomic status and material deprivation based on data from the 2000 Census, and neighborhood smoking prevalence estimates from the Current Population Survey-Tobacco Use Supplement 2000. Our research examines how neighborhood structural characteristics and social processes relate to each other and to individual characteristics that are the proximate determinants of maternal substance use from preconception through the early childhood parenting period.
The results will be applied toward further research in three directions: policy and interventions for mothers, the study of child health outcomes, and enhanced research in social processes, structural effects, and policy inputs during a critical period for women’s and children’s health.