Underage Drinking: Parent Vs. Adolescent Perspectives on Motives

Background/Purpose: Underage drinking is an illegal action which can lead to negative outcomes for children. The responsibility for curbing underage drinking often falls on parents. Knowing a child’s motives for underage drinking can help a parent predict in what circumstances their child is likely to drink, and how best to intervene. Although research has addressed adolescent motives for underage drinking, there is a gap in the literature as to parents’ perceptions of adolescent motives for drinking. Four common motives for drinking derived from the literature include: coping, enhancement, social, and conformative. The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a difference between parent and adolescent perceptions of motives for underage drinking. Research question: Do parents of middle school students identify the same motives for drinking underage as middle school students identify?

Methods: This study utilized both primary data collection and secondary analysis techniques to gather data. A point-in-time survey was administered to a purposive sample of students enrolled at a middle school in the southeastern United States using a cross-sectional survey design. All study procedures were approved of by the school as well as by the Institutional Review Board of a local university. Students who provided assent and parental permission to participate in the study filled out a 2 page questionnaire on motives for underage drinking during school while non-participating students completed an alternate activity. Parent responses were obtained from a subsection of a previous survey administered at the same school (Parent Perspectives on Underage Drinking) which identified parents’ perceptions of motives for underage drinking. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to determine if the survey items conform to the four motives for underage drinking listed in the literature: enhancement, conformity, coping, and social motives. These data could not be directly compared since they were obtained from two different samples. To examine motive item responses from both surveys, frequency distributions were calculated for each item.

Results: Two hundred and four students were invited to participate in the study. Of those students, 66 participated for a response rate of 32.4% and a completion rate of 95.7%. The CFA indicated that the questionnaire on motives for underage drinking followed the four factor structure identified in the literature. The statistical results of the CFA are as follows: χ2 /df = 2.94, CFI = .95, NNFI (TLI) = .94, RMSEA = .14, SRMR = .054. Survey results indicate that parents place a higher importance on the various motives for underage drinking than do students. For example, 67.6% of parents thought that social motives were either very important or somewhat important when deciding to drink underage, while 65.17% of students thought that social motives were NOT important when deciding to drink underage.

Conclusions and Implications: The discrepancy between parent and adolescent perceptions of motives for underage drinking indicates that parents may be misinformed in determining why adolescents drink underage. Practitioners may wish to address parental awareness of motives for underage drinking. Future research might survey matched parent and adolescent duos.