Contextual Factors That Influence Alcohol Use Behaviors

ABSTRACT

This study tests a multilevel model of factors that affect adolescents' decisions to use alcohol. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to estimate the variance in alcohol use accounted for by the influences of individual, social, and neighborhood factors. Social factors are significant predictors of alcohol use across several models tested, while selected neighborhood factors were generally not. Results indicate that social and community contexts have important effects on adolescent alcohol use, and that social influences were more significant predictors of alcohol use than neighborhood factors for this sample.

KEYWORDS:

• Alcohol
• adolescent
• social influence

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the contributions of Nicholas Ialongo, Robin H. Pugh-Yi, and Marie C. Jipguep-Akhtar, who provided substantive and editorial feedback on the manuscript. The author also acknowledges Dr. Ialongo for providing data for analysis.

Funding

The data were collected with the support of a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, DA11796, Nicholas Ialongo, PI. The author was partially supported by National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R24DA021470. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Note

Notes

1. For more information about the sample and interventions, please see Ialongo and colleagues (Ialongo et al., 1999).