Tailored substance abuse prevention is dependent upon correctly identifying important risk and protective mechanisms. Findings from survival and propensity score analyses of European ancestry families highlight the importance of parental separation for very early substance involvement beyond parental alcoholism. However, risk mechanisms associated with parental separation identified in largely White European ancestry families cannot be assumed to generalize to African American families. To better characterize risk to African American offspring, additional research is needed with increased samples sizes for adequately powered analyses, preferably with matching of families for both parental separation and parental alcoholism.
