At This Year's Annual Meeting of the Society for Prevention Research, We Gathered Reflections

Live from SPR

July 5, 2016

At this year's Annual Meeting of the Society for Prevention Research, we gathered reflections from presenters and attendees and edited them into a short podcast. Learn a little about the conference, or if you were there, relive it. (Maybe you'll hear yourself in the background.)Topics are wide-ranging and include the value of the conference, time-varying effect modeling, and e-cigarettes. Interviewees include Claire Mawditt, Yvonne Terry-McElrath,Michael J. Parks, JessicaBraymiller,andMichael Russell.

Announcer:The Methodology Center Perspective podcast is brought to you by the Methodology Center at Penn State, your source for cutting-edge research methodology in the social, behavioral and health sciences.

Aaron Wagner:Hello everyone, and welcome to Methodology Minutes. I'm your host, Aaron Wagner, and this week we're recording live from the 24th annual meeting of the Society for Prevention Research in San Francisco, California.

The interviews in this podcast are brief, and recorded in and around the conference. So, in some cases, there will be a lot of background noise. I'll be talking to people from the Methodology Center as well as other presenters and attendees from around the conference. It's meant to give you a quick look inside one of our favorite conferences of the year. Enjoy.

So we just finished the first plenary session on the first day.

Claire Mawditt:Yes, we have. So, my name is Claire Mawditt I'm based at University College London, and I'm a PhD student there in the Center for Life Course Studies and Society and Health. I'm visiting for 12 weeks the Methodology Center at Penn State University.

I'm working alongside Bethany Bray learning more about latent variable modeling. I've come to SPI today because I'm really interested in prevention science. My doctorate is looking at alcohol, smoking, diet and physical activity and how we can improve these behaviors to prevent noncommunicable diseases in populations. And that last session was really interesting in terms of the intergenerational transmission of behaviors and also mental health outcomes. I thought that was really interesting, particularly incarcerated parents. And the last talk was also interesting in terms of suicide prevention and mental health outcomes for improving the acceptance of lesbian and gay children.

Aaron Wagner:Should be a great conference. Thank you very much.

Claire Mawditt:Yeah, thank you.

Aaron Wagner:We just completed a session on alcohol use issues across the lifespan, and with me is one of the presenters.

Yvonne T-M:Hi, I'm Yvonne Terry-McElrath. I'm a senior research associate at the University of Michigan, and my main research interests are substance use in adolescence and young adulthood.

Aaron Wagner:And what brought you to SPR?

Yvonne T-M:This is the first time I've attended the conference. I previously focused more on public health and sociology, but I really wanted to be able to get a prevention focus, and I know that this conference is particularly important to funders that I work with, and just the opportunity to focus completely on a prevention approach was very interesting to me.

Aaron Wagner:Well, the session was really great and lively, and I think that every single person in the room asked a question and engaged in the discussion, which is generally a good sign. What did you get out of the session?

Yvonne T-M:I was very interested in the fact that it combined both a macro-level focus as well as a micro-level focus. In terms of Paul Gilbert's presentation looking at differences between individuals who were able to move between one level of alcohol use to another level of alcohol use and sort of a harm-reduction viewpoint, from that aspect of prevention, all the way to a micro-level, what are the actual contexts in which adolescents are engaging in alcohol use, from MalinaBersamin. And the ability to span that breadth was very interesting and have everyone in the audience really be able to ask important and insightful questions that helped everyone else's presentations and focus for where to go next in research.

Aaron Wagner:Thanks, Yvonne.

Yvonne T-M:You're welcome.

Aaron Wagner:In this next segment, I speak to Michael J. Parks of the Minnesota Department of Health.

So we have just completed a session on time-varying effect modeling, where there were five brief presentations on TVEM. And so with me is Mike, who attended the session.

Michael Parks:Yeah, my name's Mike. I'm a research scientist and I work at the Minnesota Department of Health, and a lot of the stuff what we do at the Department of Health is actually oriented towards prevention science. We do a lot of trying to take evidence-based work and implementing it in population-based practice. So yeah, I found this particular session pretty interesting and helpful for me, actually. I know it was targeting methodologists and describing some of the methodology used for understanding new ways to study time and help behaviors over time. What I took away from it was substantive stuff, so a lot of the material was helpful for us in terms of our tobacco control efforts in some ways. So we know that adolescents are beginning to use e-cigarettes at a higher rate, but the analyses that we saw from this session showed some of the dynamics of dual use in a way, in different times, and at different ages that were really quite helpful for us in terms of what types of programs we might promote, such as changing tobacco laws to 21, so that certain ages under the ages 21 or under the ages 18 may sort of stop exploring with multiple tobacco products and stuff like that.

Aaron Wagner:That's really cool. So what you brought you to SPR this year?

Michael Parks:Yeah, I actually find SPR to be one of my favorite conferences. You can find a range of health behaviors, not just tobacco use or you can find sessions on alcohol use and antisocial behavior. And then it's not even just understanding health behaviors but taking a lot of the work that you establish as evidence-based and figuring out how to implement them and disseminate these programs are evidence-based. So I think it's more of, the major thing that attracts me is the range of topics and not just establishing an evidence base but what to do with that evidence base in terms of translating to practice. So yeah, it's probably my favorite conference that I go to.

Aaron Wagner:We love it too. Anyhow, thanks Mike.

Michael Parks:Sounds good. Thank you.

Aaron Wagner:So we just completed a session about e-cigarettes and other electronic nicotine devices and their use with marijuana.

Jess Braymiller:Hi, I'm Jess Braymiller. I am a grad student in BBH at Penn State and I'm working with Stephanie Lanza and people at the Methodology Center. And I am really interested in electronic cigarettes and their co-use with other products, maybe even in the same electronic device or just using multiple products in the context of one day. So this session was really relevant to me, and it gave me some new insight on how to look at marijuana in e-juice and liquid make THC and being used with e-juice and e-liquids that are typically used in electronic cigarettes in a new way. It was very fascinating, really interesting, because I had never really thought about that. And given the new recreational legalization of marijuana in certain states, it provided a new light and a new way to think about these things, which was really interesting.

Aaron Wagner:And why did you decide to come to SPR this year?

Jess Braymiller:I came to SPR to present my research using TVEM in adolescent e-cigarette use, but I also came because I'm really interested overall in understanding the etiology of adolescent substance use and how that relates to later outcomes, and this is a really great venue to do that. There are so many people having that conversation. It's been really great getting to hear different people's perspectives on these issues.

Aaron Wagner:Thank you very much, Jess.

Jess Braymiller:You're welcome.

Aaron Wagner:So now, as the conference is winding down, I am here to talk to Mike about his thoughts about the conference in general.

Mike Russell:Thank you, Aaron. So I'm Michael Russell. I'm a research associate at the Methodology Center, and my interests are broadly in the causes and consequences of problem behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood, such as antisocial behavior and substance use.

And this conference has been really great. I've been able to make a lot of connections with a diverse group of prevention scientists. There was tremendous interest in our TVEM session yesterday, and we got a lot of great questions from people. We had a lot of interest in the work that we were doing. So overall, it's been very fun and very informative, and it's exciting to see all the great work that prevention scientists are doing.

Aaron Wagner:Thank you very much.

Mike Russell:Thank you.

Aaron Wagner:Thanks for listening. That's it for this podcast.

If you like what you heard, consider joining us next year at the SPR conference in Washington, DC.

Announcer:You have been listening to the Methodology Center Perspective podcast, brought to you by the Methodology Center at Penn State, your source for cutting-edge research methodology in the social, behavioral and health sciences.

PODCAST24 / Page 1 of 4