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Social norms predicted risk of adolescent alcohol use
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High school students raised within more restrictive social norms were less likely to use alcohol, compared with peers who were raised within more permissive environments, according to study results.
“These results not only underscore the importance of social context and social norms as potential determinants of alcohol use in adolescence but also illustrate that variation in the social context at the population level is a potential determinant of the population’s alcohol use,” the researchers wrote.
Katherine M. Keyes, PhD, a Columbia University Epidemiology Merit Fellow, and colleagues analyzed 32 national surveys of US high school students, focusing on 967,562 adolescents between the years 1976 to 2007.
To measure the frequency of alcohol consumption among birth cohorts, students were asked the number of occasions they used alcohol in the past 12 months. Quantity of alcohol was measured by asking the number of occasions students consumed five or more drinks consecutively — defined as binge drinking — in the past 2 weeks. Students were also asked about their attitudes toward binge drinking. The researchers used multilevel models to determine how permissive social norms were according to each cohort.
Each 5% increase in cohort-specific disapproval of alcohol use was associated with a 12% decrease in the odds of alcohol use in the past 12 months (OR=0.88; 99% CI, 0.87-0.89). Binge drinking was highest (41.8%) and disapproval lowest (55.1%) in 1979, the peak in alcohol consumption in the US. While binge drinking was lowest in 2007 (18.0%), disapproval was highest (84.2%) in 1992. Binge drinking was the highest (41.6%) and disapproval lowest (54.3%) for students born in 1962.
“Clinician assumptions that patients acquire all their attitudes about drinking from a society with uniform, consistent norms may lead to overlooking external sources of variability in patients’ attitudes toward change,” Keyes told Healio.com. “Taking such variability into account may help clinicians address readiness to change in a more informed and effective manner.”
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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