Family factors and peer influence in adolescent heavy alcohol use

¶ … predicts heavy alcohol use among adolescents?

J. Greg Getz and James H. Bray in examining the heavy use of alcohol among adolescent found that family factors, the separation anxiety, psychosocial behavioral factors, and ethnic status were important predictors. Family factor, especially mother's parental monitoring and psychosocial behavioral factors were strong discriminators in identifying the groups between heavy users and low users of the alcohol

The strong independent factors that show the evidence of heavy alcohol use among adolescents were the alcohol use of peers, race/ethnicity, marijuana use, and age. The weaker but significant factors for identifying the heavy use of alcohol were deviant behavior of the adolescents, and family conflict. In addition, age of the adolescents and the race also were found to predict the heavy use of alcohol.

Two of the key strong factors: previous marijuana use and family conflict considered putting adolescents at greater risk for heavy alcohol use, after the early initiation of the use of alcohol or other drugs, and deviance behavior. Family conflict has been found strongly impacting the long-term, deleterious, psychosocial consequences for adolescents. However, the family conflict does not directly impact the psychosocial behavior, rather this is resulted through the mediating effect of stress.