Associations of perceived drinking motives of parents and friends on adolescents’ own drinking motives

Abstract

Adolescents form perceptions of why their parents and friends drink alcohol that may impact adolescents’ own drinking motives. This study tested whether perceived drinking motives of parents and friends are associated with adolescents’ own drinking motives. Participants included community-recruited adolescents 14–17 years (N = 105; 63.8% female) who drank alcohol in the past year. Perceived parent and friend motives both related to adolescent drinking motives at the bivariate level; however, only friend motives remained statistically significant in the final hierarchical regression models controlling for relevant covariates (e.g., alcohol frequency). Findings support a social-cognitive modeling pathway in the development of adolescents’ own drinking motives and highlight the perception of why others drink as a potential intervention target.

Notes

1 Two items (“because it helps when I feel depressed or nervous” and “to forget about problems”) were accidentally excluded due to an administration error.

2 Because of the one statistically significant difference of race on Own-Conformity motives, additional analyses were conducted with race included as a covariate across models. Identical results were obtained across analyses; however, because of the small overall sample and sub-group samples (i.e., Non-White N = 30), we elected to present the most parsimonious model.