 | The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
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| The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
Jennifer R. Boyle, MS and Bradley O. Boekeloo, MS, PhD. Department of Public and Community Health, University of Maryland, 1242E HHP Bldg., Valley Drive, College Park, MD 20742-2611, (301) 405-2551, boylej@wam.umd.edu
Exposure to peer drinking could be expected to encourage some adolescents to binge drink. It is less clear, however, whether exposure to peer drinking would have a long-term impact on binging over and above other personal characteristics and risk behaviors. We hypothesized that baseline exposure to peer drinking would be associated with binging at 6 months and 1 year. In this investigation, 444, 80% African American adolescents, age 12-17 years receiving general health check-ups in managed care clinics participated in a brief alcohol prevention intervention and were interviewed regarding their alcohol risk behaviors at baseline, 6 months, and 1 year. A peer drinking scale was constructed (Cronbach?s Alpha = .73 ) using 3 baseline measures. These included having been somewhere in the past 30 days where the adolescent saw or suspected that other teens were drinking and hanging out with friends who were drinking. At 6 months and 1 year, a dichotomous binging indicator captured whether adolescents had consumed 5 or more drinks in a row in the past 3 months. In logistic regressions of binging at 6 and 12 months, covariates included in the model were: baseline binging, intervention group, age, gender, ethnicity, baseline sexual risk behaviors, baseline depression, baseline cutting class, and baseline peer drinking. Results showed that at 6 months and 1 year, baseline peer drinking was significantly associated with binge drinking (OR=2.03, 95%CI=1.37, 2.99 and OR=2.14, 95%CI=1.69, 2.71 respectively). Peer drinking may have long-term effects on adolescent binging.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Adolescents, Binge Drinking
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.