Sibling Training Hypothesis: Alcohol Use Behaviors Among Three Adolescent Siblings

ABSTRACT

The sibling training hypothesis posits that younger siblings will come to resemble older siblings but has not been tested across three adolescent sibling dyads. In paired t-tests, sibling training was assessed across three sibling dyads (N = 102 families, 306 adolescents, Add Health data set, Waves 1 and 2). Evidence for drinking training appeared in the oldest/middle sibling dyad but not in dyads involving the youngest sibling. In latent congruence modeling, significant predictors of sibling drinking similarity included drinking by friends in the oldest/middle and oldest/youngest dyads. Research beyond the study of a single sibling dyad in a family is needed to better understand the generalizability of social influences, how they come about as well as consequences for adolescents and their families.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• alcohol use
• national longitudinal study of adolescent to adult health (add health)
• sibling deviance training
• sibling differences
• latent congruence modeling

Acknowledgments

This research used data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mulan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/ Add Health). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Council on Family Relations Annual Meeting, Virtual Meeting St. Louis, MO, November 2020.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.