One in four U.S. children lives in a family where alcohol and/or drug abuse affect daily life.

Parental substance abuse puts these children at increased risk of physical illness, emotional disturbances, behavior problems, lower educational performance and susceptibility to addiction, according to the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information.

And, yet, some teenagers with substance-abusing parents show significantly fewer negative effects than others, says Christine Ohannessian, who is conducting research to try to find out how this happens.

Ohannessian, assistant professor of individual and family studies at UD, has been examining adolescent development since she received her doctorate in human development and family studies from Pennsylvania State University in 1992. Over the years, her work has become focused on how parental alcohol and drug addiction affects teenagers.

Last year, Ohannessian received a $679,000 Early Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to conduct a five-year study of children with substance-abusing parents. She is examining factors that may help these youngsters cope with, and protect them from, some of the negative effects of their parents’ behavior.

Ohannessian says the primary goals of the study are to examine whether characteristics such as self-worth and coping abilities influence the effect that a parent’s alcoholism has on a child’s adjustment during adolescence and if the effects of these characteristics change over time.

In addition, the study seeks to determine whether such aspects of the adolescents’ surroundings as the family, school and peers also play significant moderating roles in the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent adjustment and whether these influences, too, change over time.

Importantly, the research also will examine whether the hypothesized moderating variables have different effects depending on the gender of the adolescent and/or the gender of the parent.

“We’re interested in a variety of psychosocial variables that could moderate the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent adjustment,” Ohannessian says. “For example, if these young people are involved in music and sports, are they better able to cope? Does having a positive relationship with a sibling act as a protective factor?”

She and her graduate students initiated the study in 2005, compiling the survey and selecting the families they would be following for the next four years. The researchers are tracking 400 teens and their parents through questionnaires administered this spring and summer.

“We’re going into five high schools in Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania collecting survey data from ninth- and 10th-graders,” Ohannessian says.

The questionnaires are designed to assess parental substance abuse and identify such psychological problems as depression and anxiety. They also seek to identify the children’s coping techniques, family functioning, school involvement and a variety of psychosocial variables that, in theory, moderate the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent adjustment.

Some of the specific questions the adolescents will be asked are how they spend their time, how much use they make of technology—including video games, cell phones and iPods—how satisfied they are with their families, if they ever have thought a parent has had a drinking problem and if they wished their parent or parents would stop drinking.

The 400 families being studied are volunteers, so the sample is extremely diverse, Ohannessian says, and families have a wide range of characteristics. “It’s a community sample, not a clinical sample,” she says.

“What is most exciting about this study is that we will be able to look at the data and predict things that will happen over time. Ideally, I want to follow the adolescents into adulthood, especially early adulthood, from after high school to work or through college to see what happens to them,” Ohannessian says.

She says she plans to analyze the data from the study and use it as a foundation for a larger, more extensive, long-term longitudinal investigation designed to examine the underlying processes involved in the relationship between parental alcoholism and adolescent psychological adjustment.

Ohannessian joined the UD faculty in 2004. She previously was a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry at the University of Connecticut and an assistant professor of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas and in the psychiatry department at the University of Connecticut Medical School. She also served as a biostatistician and as the interim director of biostatistics in the General Clinical Research Center at the University of Connecticut Medical School.

Ohannessian is the author or co-author of more than 30 scholarly papers on adolescent development, specializing in family dynamics where at least one parent was addicted to alcohol or drugs.

—Barbara Garrison