The Study of Adolescent to Adult Neural Development (SAND): Examining the neurobehavioral impacts of poverty-related adversity in the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Cohort

Brain and Environment

This article describes the motivation for the Study of Adolescent to Adult Neural Development (SAND), an extension of the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). FFCWS is a population-based sample of urban families with enrichment for non-marital births followed since birth. The SAND was started in 2014 and began recruiting a subsample of FFCWS families when youth were 15 years old. Based on the demographics of the included FFCWS cities, SAND has high representation of participants identifying as Black or African American and families with low income. Thus, the cohort focuses on people traditionally under-represented in research, particularly neuroimaging research. SAND has continued to follow and expand the cohort through early adulthood with data collection at age 15 (N=237), 17 (survey only; N= 189), 21 (N=518), during COVID (survey only; N=695), and 24 (ongoing).