¶ … 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.
Although age for the initiation of alcohol use was not an important variable but age was critical discriminator in predicting the heavy alcohol use. The older adolescents were found heavier user of alcohol than that of younger ones, because older adolescents were likely to have greater availability of disposable income and greater contact with peers who drink. The authors also found that African-American were less heavy alcohol users than were non-Hispanic White and Mexican-American adolescents.
In sum, the authors found that ineffective parenting is the main cause of the heavy use of alcohol. Since ineffective parenting directly impacts family conflict, mother's monitoring, and mother's alcohol use, and the involvement of adolescents with alcohol-using peers, which in turn, affect the heavy use of alcohol among adolescents.
