The use of transdisciplinary research to understand youth health and risk behaviors has opened up immeasurable opportunities for expanding traditional disciplinary research frameworks. The current study demonstrates a transdisciplinary research strategy for the study of substance abusing youth that integrates individual, social, and geographical levels of analysis in order to understand the ecology of risk and protection for urban youth. Participants included 37 adolescents aged 14 through 18 years who were recruited as a convenience sample from the Georgetown University Medical Center; the sample was drawn from a high crime risk area with a dense concentration of alcohol outlets compared to the rest of the city. Participants completed the Adolescent Drug Involvement Scale (ADIS), the Children’s Depression Inventory, the Adolescent-Family Inventory, and the Ecological Interview. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) was used to extract environmental data for the participant’s zip codes and spatial relationships between specific locations were derived. Participant self-report information was merged with the GIS data to describe the social ecology of urban adolescent substance use. Next, a case study was constructed using actual information in order to illustrate the methodology for a three-dimensional ecological profile of adolescent substance users. Linear distances were derived to show the distance between the users’ home and their identified risky and safe places. The distance between the users’ homes and their safe places were, on average, more than three times the distance to their risky places. Thus, the study illustrated how urban adolescent substance use can be understood through a transdisciplinary analysis of adolescents’ social ecologies and shows how an ecological perspective can be applied at an individual level of analysis. Tables, figures, glossary, references