- Adolescents who drink alcohol, smoke and/or use drugs
tend to have peers who do the same.
- New research findings suggest that girls may be more
influenced by their friends’ drinking.
- Having opposite-sex friends who drink is also associated
with increased drinking for both genders.
Adolescents who drink alcohol, smoke and/or use drugs
tend to have peers who do the same. A new study that looked
at other factors which may moderate the influence of peers
has found that gender, and gender of friends, can also
affect this association.
Results are published in the December issue of Alcoholism:
Clinical & Experimental Research.
"Several studies have found that peer drinking has more
of an influence on an adolescent's drinking than his or
her own parent's drinking," said Danielle Dick, corresponding
author for the study. Now at Virginia Commonwealth University,
Dick was an assistant professor at Washington University,
St. Louis when this study was conducted.
"We wanted to more closely examine the role that gender
may also play, because even though there are profound
differences that occur in development between girls and
boys during adolescence, little is known about how influences
on alcohol use may differ between the sexes during this
developmental period," said Dick.
Researchers used data from a population-based, longitudinal
twin study of behavioral development and health-risk factors
from Finland (n= ~ 4,700 individuals). They analyzed the
association between friendship characteristics and alcohol
use, testing for interaction with gender and gender of
friends. They also used the twin structure of the data
to examine the extent to which similarity in drinking
behaviors between adolescents and their friends was due
to shared genetic and/or environmental pathways.
"Our findings suggest that girls may be more susceptible
to their friends' drinking," said Dick, "and that having
opposite-sex friends who drink is also associated with
increased drinking, for both sexes. Furthermore, genetically
based analyses suggest that the correlation between adolescent/friend
drinking was largely attributable to shared environmental
effects across genders. This suggests that the association
between an adolescent's alcohol use and that of his or
her peers is not merely a reflection of genetic influences
on the adolescent's own alcohol use that cause them to
select drinking peers."
In other words, said Kenneth J. Sher, Curators' Professor
in the department of psychological sciences at the University
of Missouri, the influence of risk factors associated
with the peer network appeared to be stronger in girls.
"Those who design and implement prevention approaches
should take gender into account as a potentially critical
moderator of prevention outcomes," said Sher. "We need
to better understand the 'why' of sex differences in risk
in order to shed important light on the nature of risk
processes. For example, are girls potentially more 'vulnerable'
to peer-related effects at this stage of life because
they are likely to be more intimately involved with their
closest friends than are boys" That is, does gender simply
serve as a 'proxy' of a variable such as intimacy or closeness
during this time of their lives?'"
Both Dick and Sher cautioned parents to be very aware
of their child's friends, as well as how they spend their
time together. "This awareness," said Dick, "is particularly
important for girls, and when the friendship group consists
of members of the opposite sex."
Sher suggested that future studies look more closely
at how friendship networks change over time, and how that
may affect alcohol use among peers.
"These investigations need to carefully consider the
ages being studied because the extent that alcohol use
is deviant changes rapidly over the course of adolescence,
the relative importance of genetic and environmental factors
appears to change, and the degree of gender differences
in risk factors might also vary as a function of age,"
he said.
