One of the objectives of the NIH-initiative, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, is to establish a national, multisite, longitudinal cohort study to prospectively examine the youth from childhood (ages 9–10) through adolescence to examine the risk and protective factors influencing the trajectories of substance use and its consequences, examine the impact of detailed patterns of substance use on neurocognitive development, health and psychosocial outcomes, and to study the interactive relationship between substance use and psychopathology in youth (https://abcdstudy.org/). The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the ABCD Study Substance Use Workgroup goals, rationale for the substance use battery, and detailed methods of the battery in order for the scientific community to achieve improved harmonization in substance use assessment, which have varied widely, especially in measurement of frequency/quantity patterns of use (Conway et al., 2014).
