Abstract
To mitigate the social and economic costs of hazardous adolescent drinking, issues of measurement and risk and protection must be explored especially via longitudinal studies with multiethnic samples of youth. The current dissertation seeks to (1) compare the extent to which the developmental trajectories of occurrence and frequency of meeting adult criteria for binge drinking and perceived intoxication, predict common adolescent health risk behaviors at the end of 12th grade; (2) chart the trajectories of alcohol-specific prevention conversations with peers and parents over the course of adolescence and link them to health risk and problem behaviors (e.g. binge drinking, intoxication, marijuana use, impaired driving) at the end of high school; and (3) evaluate the degree to which the predictive relationships between the growth parameters of peer and parent alcohol prevention conversations and health risk behaviors at the end of 12th grade are moderated by participants’ perceptions of peers’ alcohol use and hazardous drinking in the family.
An accelerated longitudinal design was used to map the developmental course of adolescence from 6th to 12th grade. Structural equation modeling was utilized to investigate the specific aims of this dissertation. Data were collected in the Miami and Washington DC metro areas. The study was conducted with an ethnically diverse sample (39.2% Hispanic, 28.3% Black, 8.0% White) of 808 public school students.
Aim one results indicated self-reported intoxication appears to be an appropriate index of unhealthy drinking for this ethnically diverse, urban sample of adolescents. Results for the last two aims indicated complex interactions between peer and parent alcohol specific prevention conversations and associations with peers who drink and perceived risk for hazardous drinking in the family. Neither alcohol use prevention communication with peers nor alcohol use prevention communication with parents was uniformly protective or iatrogenic.