Alcohol prevalence and attitudes: effects on early adolescent use in rural communities

¶ … Boljevac (2010) investigated how living in a rural community was related to alcohol use and attitudes towards alcohol in adolescents. Past research had indicated that rural living was not a protective factor against adolescent alcohol use; however, there is a wide discrepancy in the prevalence of rural adolescent alcohol use reported in previous studies. In order to better understand these findings the researchers explored how perceived and actual controls for or against drinking were related to attitudes and alcohol use in rural adolescents. Students in the sixth to eighth grades in 22 rural Northern Plains communities as well as parents and rural community leaders completed questionnaires regarding alcohol usage, perceptions of use by adults and peers, controls against using, and their perceptions of attitudes for and against alcohol usage. Findings indicated that half of the adolescents in the study reported at least once in a lifetime alcohol use and 10% reported drinking alcohol in the past month (with a wide variance across communities on both variables). Perceived community supports against adolescent drinking reduced both lifetime and past month alcohol usage by adolescents, but perceptions by adolescents that their peers drank more, that the community drank more, along with low community supports against drinking were associated with whether or not adolescents had ever tried alcohol. Perceived adolescent community supportiveness and adult perceived controls against usage were related to lifetime and past month alcohol usage in adolescents.

The design of the survey indicated a qualitative approach although the results of the study are quantitative. For example, lifetime alcohol usage was assessed with a single question asking if the subject had ever used alcohol. Past month usage was determined by how many days in the past month subjects drank and how many drinks were consumed. However, many of the questions are concerning the perceptions of the subjects and not numerical facts, frequencies, or other quantitative information. Thus, qualitative data needed to be obtained. For instance, it was found that subjects did not make a distinction between some community tolerance towards adolescent drinking in certain circumstances (presciptive) or no community controls against alcohol use (nonscriptive, or complete tolerance for adolescent drinking). The community controls against drinking variable was transformed from purely quantitative data to a qualitative variable by developing 10 questions, examining their relations, and then reverse coding items for the proscriptive scale (prohibitive community controls) to develop a factor where high scores would indicate perceptions of increased community controls against adolescent drinking and lower scores indicating perceptions of little or no controls against adolescent drinking. Often existing survey questions had to be modified to fit the target group. Rewording of other survey data such as a survey designed to assess urban community supportiveness to reflect rural data indicates qualitative changes and considerations. In addition, four perceived alcohol prevalence usage in peers items were adapted from a larger adult scale and reworded for adolescents. The qualitative nature of the survey design is required as the researchers to pay particular attention to the wording of items, the perceptions of subjects concerning their peers, others, and the community in general, as well as the subjects' own attitudes.