Monitoring and understanding TV depictions of alcohol use in entertainment programming popular with youth

Background: Young people have substantial exposure to alcohol use in television entertainment programming, but there has been little recent analysis of this exposure, and there is a need for a stronger theoretical basis for understanding its impact.
Methods: A literature review explored theories to explain effects of behavioral modeling in television programming. Nielsen data identified five TV programs per year with the most 12-20 year-old viewers from 2002/2003 2011/2012. Content analysis on the three top rated episodes from each program, for a total of 150 episodes analyzed, was supplemented by qualitative ethnographic content analysis of alcohol-use scenes.
Results: Existing theories help explain why young viewers identify with certain characters and are more likely to imitate their drinking behaviors. Adult cartoons made up 40% of the most highly rated TV shows among 12-20 year old viewers, and over 80% of TV shows included alcohol use. Although the majority of characters drinking were male, the proportion of female drinkers increased over the study period, as did the proportion of drinks consumed by female versus male characters. Prominent alcohol use themes were relaxation, socializing and sexuality.
Conclusions: Role modeling theories inform our understanding of how youth form relationships with fictional television characters and become vulnerable to imitating their behaviors. In this context the rise in drinking by female characters is of particular concern. Regular monitoring of how drinking is depicted on television programming, with particular attention to drinking by female characters, can help complement other efforts to reduce youth exposure to alcohol marketing.