Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Parental And Peer Influences On Adolescent Drinking: The Relative Impact Of Attachment And Opportunity, Lizabeth A. Crawford, Katherine B. Novak

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The purpose of this paper was to assess the relative effects of parents and peers on adolescent alcohol use via mechanisms of attachment and opportunity. Panel data from the second and third waves of the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS:88) were used to examine the relationship between multiple measures of peer and parent-child relations reflecting these concepts and alcohol use among high-school students. Overall, our results indicated that peers are more influential than parents in shaping adolescents’ patterns of alcohol consumption and that unstructured peer interaction is an especially powerful predictor of adolescent alcohol use and binge drinking. Our findings …