LATROBE, PA – Chris Jodis, G’18, recently was recognized by the American Society of Criminology (ASC) for his research into how family history and social support affect the likelihood of developing an alcohol use disorder.
Jodis, who earned his master’s degree in criminology from Saint Vincent, is a doctoral student at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. This past November, he received the Rolf Leober Student Innovation Award at the ASC’s annual conference in San Francisco.
“I come from a very supportive family, a very supportive background, said Jodis, whose father, Dr. Stephen Jodis, is dean of the Herbert W. Boyer School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Computing at Saint Vincent College. “I've been very lucky, so I'm interested in investigating what social support does for people [in high-risk situations].”
Past research has shown that people with family histories of alcohol abuse have a higher risk of developing that disorder. Jodis’ analysis took a deeper dive into the data and found that social support mitigates the risk level.
“It seems like a common-sense study, but it hasn't really been looked at in a large representative sample until now,” he said.
Researchers on this topic in the 1970s and 1980s had to rely on small sample sizes. Jodis, however, had access to the National Epidemiologic Survey of Alcohol-Related Conditions (NESARC)—a huge data set of more than 46,000 adults in the United States.
The first wave of the NESARC was conducted in 2001-2002. The second wave of interviews was conducted in 2004-2005. The third was conducted in 2012-2013. The data is available via HeathData.gov.
Jodis’ study used data from the second wave. He would like to initiate more research using the more recent data.
“Things have changed so much since then,” Jodis said. “It'd be very interesting to see what happened during COVID-19 or post-COVID-19. I imagine a lot of things about people's behaviors and substance use were affected by the lockdown.”
Jodis earned a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology from California State University Monterey Bay and a master’s from Saint Vincent. He began working on a doctorate at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, then transferred to Florida State University in 2020.
“It's been a long road,” Jodis said. “I was part of the first cohort for the Master of Science in Criminology program at Saint Vincent and it feels like that was a long time ago.”
Jodis is grateful for the outpouring of the assistance and encouragement he received at each of the stops during his academic journey. “It's [fitting] that I'm studying social support, because all the support I've had is what enabled me to do that in the first place,” he said.
Chris Jodis
Chris Jodis receives the Rolf Leober Student Innovation Award at the ASC’s annual conference in San Francisco.
