DESCRIPTION: (provided by applicant)The purpose of this five year research application is to develop the research infrastructure of Florida International University (FIU) to conduct epidemiological research on the extent and nature of drug among Latino persons of Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Honduran, and Nicaraguan descent. FIU is ideally suited for the development of such a program of research because it has one of the largest concentrations of Latino faculty and students from the above Latino subgroups of any institution of higher learning in the mainland United States (Hispanic Association of College and Universities, 1999). More specifically, we expect to accomplish this aim through: 1) Involving a group of FIU faculty members, primarily from the College of Healthand Urban Affairs, the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, and Psychology, and the Centers for Latin American and Caribbean studies at FIU in a two year advanced drug abuse epidemiological research training program leading to a competitive research grant on the epidemiology of drug abuse in Latino populations in the Miami-Dade area. 2) Increasing the number of graduate students involved in the conduct of epidemiologic drug abuse research withLatino populations in the Miami-Dade area by providing basic epidemiological research training to graduate students at FIU. 3) Supporting research development activities for faculty involved in the conduct of drug abuse research with Latino populations in the Miami-Dade area through ongoing funded drug abuse studies or the two pilot studies (women and violence) proposed bythe Latino MDARP. And 4) Increasing FIU infrastructure to conduct epidemiological research on the extent and nature of drug abuse among Latino populations in the Miami-Dade area by conducting two pilot studies directly linked to the training activities of the Latino MDARP. One of the pilot studies will be a community-based epidemiological study that will document the problemof drug-related violence in Latino populations in the Miami-Dade area. The second pilot study will focus on investigating the inter-generational transmission of drug use between Cuban mothers and daughters in the Miami-Dade area.
