Media Influences on Early Onset Alcohol Use

Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding why young adolescents begin to drink and go on to escalate alcohol use is a key element to preventing adolescent alcohol misuse. Although it is known that adolescents initiate drinking in response to social influences, the entertainment industry remains an understudied influence, and we know of no research examining the role of movies as an influence on adolescent drinking. Our preliminary data indicates that viewing movie alcohol use influences initiation of drinking. Movie depictions of sexual behavior and violence concurrent with alcohol use may have additional effects, and continued exposure to movie depictions could influence escalation of alcohol use and possibly other outcomes (e.g., aggressive behavior). However, the nature of these media effects has not been extensively investigated in large representative samples. To learn more about the effect of movies on youth alcohol use and violence, we propose to conduct theoretically-based analyses on two (2) data sets, both with youth aged 10-14 at baseline: Study 1 is a 2-wave data set from a school sample covering 2415 Northern New England students, and Study 2 is a 4-wave data set from a nationally representative sample of 6522 U.S. adolescents 10-14 years. We aim to a) examine content analysis data on alcohol use, alcohol brand depictions, violence, sex, and illicit drug use in over 1000 popular contemporary movies released between 1990 and 2005; b) obtain estimates of adolescents' exposure to these factors in movies and examine the relation between such movie exposures and adolescents' alcohol use and other problem behaviors; c) test for moderation of movie exposure effects by selected variables (e.g., gender, ethnicity, self-control); d) test for indirect effects of movie exposure on adolescents' alcohol use through mediators such as alcohol expectancies and cognitive images of users; e) in longitudinal analyses using latent growth modeling, examine changes in adolescents' attitudes and behavior over time as a function of ongoing exposure to movie alcohol use; and f) using associative latent growth models, investigate relations between alcohol use and violence over time. The analyses will be conducted with controls for a number of covariates that may be correlated with movie exposure (e.g. sensation seeking, parenting style), will examine alcohol exposure effects for participants of different ages, and will test for replicated findings across the two independent studies. The work will be conducted by an interdisciplinary, team with expertise in substance use theory and analytic procedures.