• Drug prevention programs often assume shared parent-child perceptions of drug use risk factors.

• Factors influencing perceptions of risk:

  • Cultural factors: varying perspectives on drug acceptability and dangers.
  • Experiential factors: personal or family history of drug use.
  • Genetic factors: predispositions affecting substance use disorder likelihood and risk perception.

Based on these assumptions, we develop prevention programs that modify parents’ behaviors, with the hope that these changes will align with the perceptions of their children.

Participants

• N = 194 parent-student dyads from a public school in Bogotá, Colombia.
• Students’ age: M = 15.4 years (SD = 1.30 ); Parents’ age: M = 41.9 years (SD = 9.11 ).

Data Collection Procedures

• Parents invited to participate via letter with consent form, survey, and return envelope.
  
• Parents completed survey and returned it via regular mail.
  
• Students of participating parents completed survey individually during school hours.
  
• Student survey linked to parent survey via ID.

• Parent-Youth Risk and Protective Factor Survey, adapted from Communities That Care Youth Survey. (Arthur et al. 2007)

• Focus on risk perception of drug use

How much do you think people risk harming themselves (physically or in other ways) if they…

• …smoke one or more packs of cigarettes per day?
• …try marijuana once or twice?
• …smoke marijuana regularly?
• …take one or two drinks of an alcoholic beverage (beer, wine, or liquor) nearly every day?

Responses a four-point Likert-type scale: 1=high risk, 2=moderate risk, 3=low risk, 4=no risk.

Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analyses (MG-CFA) to evaluate parent-child differences in measurement of perceived harms of drug use (Muthén, Asparouhov, et al. 2002).

Estimated ACE Model to assess influence of genetics, common environmental exposure, and unique environmental experiences (Maes 2014).

Decomposes variance into three sources:
- Additive genetic variation or heritability coefficient (A).
- Shared environment (C).
- Nonshared environment (E).

ACE components are latent variables with M = 0 and SD = 1.

• Additive genetic component (A) explained:
  • 13.8% of risk perception variance among different-sex dyads.
  • 22.9% of variance among same-sex dyads.
• Environmental component (C) explained:
  • 7.0 % of risk perception variance among different-sex dyads.
  • 11.6% of variance among same-sex dyads.
• Nonshared environment (E) ranged from 65% to 79%.

• Genetics play a notable role in shaping risk perceptions:

  • But only 11.6% to 22.9% of variance explained in risk perception among same-sex dyads.

• Same-sex dyads were more likely to be similar in terms of their perceptions about drugs.

• Majority of variance not explained by A and C components of the model, indicating further research is needed to understand other contributing factors.

• Findings highlight the importance of considering these factors in the design and implementation of drug prevention programs targeting families.