Agenda for Future Research and Concluding Comments

This concluding chapter highlights issues we see as especially important next-step agendas for the field. The issues we have highlighted concern (a) the implications that a developmental frame of reference provides in characterizing and parsing the etiology and course of addictive behavior; (b) the relevance of event-level predictors occurring in microtime and the extent to which they will supercede the more summative indicators that currently dominate the substance abuse field; (c) the increasing awareness, and characterization of drug-specific influences, and the degree to which these influences are useful in evaluating the vulnerability potential of drugs of abuse; (d) the differences in characterization of clinical symptomatology and course that have the potential to occur when evaluation of psychopathology and the details of intervention methods are unpacked with a specifically developmental lens; (e) the insights that new big data collection programs will create in understanding the cross-domain causal structure of substance abuse.