Young Mountaineer Health Study

This study, "Risk and resilience pathways linking community adversity, decision making, and alcohol misuse: A prospective study of Appalachian adolescents", is a cohort study of middle school students in 20 WV schools, funded by the NIH - NIAAA.

This is a program of prospective cohort studies of approximately 2200 middle school youth from a range of 20 rural, small town, and small city (population <30,000) public schools in West Virginia.

Students are participating in 6 waves of data collection (2 per year) over the course of middle school (sixth to eighth grades; fall and spring) from 2020 to 2023. On the basis of an organizational arrangement, which includes a team of local data collection leaders, supervising contact agents in schools, and an honest broker system to deidentify data linked via school IDs, we are able to collect novel forms of data (self-reported data, teacher-reported data, census-linked area data, and archival school records) while ensuring high rates of participation by a large majority of youth in each participating school.

Link to publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35930337/