Young Adults' Knowledge of State Cannabis Policy: Implications for Studying the Effects of Legalization in Vermont.

Objectives: Cannabis policy evaluations commonly assume equal policy exposure across a state's population using date of implementation as the key independent variable. This study aimed to explore policy knowledge as another measure of exposure and describe the sociodemographic, cognitive, and behavioral correlates of cannabis policy knowledge in young adults in Vermont.

Methods: Data are from the PACE Vermont Study (Spring 2019), an online cohort study of Vermonters (12-25).

Exploring Definitions of "Addiction" in Adolescents and Young Adults and Correlation with Substance Use Behaviors.

(1) Background: Young people engage in addictive behaviors, but little is known about how they understand addiction. The present study examined how young people describe addiction in their own words and correlations between their definitions and substance use behaviors. (2) Methods: Young adults (n = 1146) in the PACE Vermont Study responded to an open-ended item “what does “addiction” mean?” in 2019.

Recruiting and Retaining Youth and Young Adults in the Policy and Communication Evaluation (PACE) Vermont Study: Randomized Controlled Trial of Participant Compensation.

Background: The standard approach for evaluating the effects of population-level substance use prevention efforts on youth and young adult perceptions and behaviors has been to compare outcomes across states using national surveillance data. Novel surveillance methods that follow individuals over shorter time intervals and capture awareness of substance use prevention policy and communication efforts may provide a stronger basis for their evaluation than annual cross-sectional studies.

Objective: This study aimed to identify a combination of strategies to recruit a sample of youth and young adults sufficiently representative of the Vermont population and determine how best to retain a web-based panel of youth and young adults over a 6-month period.