Abstract: Does Socioeconomic Status Moderate the Association between Emerging Adult Status and Risky Alcohol Use? (Society for Social Work and Research 23rd Annual Conference - Ending Gender Based, Family and Community Violence)

Schedule:

Saturday, January 19, 2019: 10:45 AM

Continental Parlor 9, Ballroom Level (Hilton San Francisco)

* noted as presenting author

Carol Lee, MSW, Doctoral Student, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

Rosana Ribeiro Tarifa, MSc, Doctoral Student, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Doug Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

Marcia Aparecida Ferreira Oliveira, PhD, Livre-Docente, Associate Professor, Sao Paulo, Brazil

INTRODUCTION TO THE RESEARCH QUESTION: There are several critiques that Jeffrey Arnett’s (2000) theory of emerging adulthood does not generalize across socioeconomic strata. Furthermore, five dimensions thought to be characteristic of emerging adulthood per this theory were proposed to be positively associated with substance use, including: feeling optimistic, being in constant transition, psychologically feeling that one is in-between adolescence and full adulthood, identity exploration, and self-focus. In order to test the generalizability of this theory, we tested how emerging adult status was associated with alcohol use, and whether this association would be moderated by socioeconomic status. We specifically hypothesized that the association between emerging adult status and alcohol use would be diminished among lower SES emerging adults, indicating problems with generalizing the theory to emerging adults from lower SES backgrounds..

DESCRIPTION OF METHODS: Participants (n=458) were Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) workers, who were previously screened for eligibility (i.e., ages 18-29 and at least one alcoholic beverage consumed in past year) using a qualification test question. We eliminated survey responses that were completed in too short a time and those that missed validity check questions. Participants completed validated measures of emerging adult status (EARS, Smith et al., 2016), SES (i.e., mother’s education, father’s education and the MacArthur scale of Subjective Social Status), and risky alcohol use (i.e., the AUDIT). A Structural Equation Model (SEM) was fitted using the Lavaan package for R (Rosseel, 2012) to test the hypothesis that the positive association between EARS and AUDIT would be diminished for those from lower SES backgrounds.

RESULTS: on average, participants were 25.39 (SD=2.84) years old, were 58.1% male and 72.7% White. The average AUDIT score was 6.38 (SD=5.69). Finally, 53.5% of participants scored lower than 5 on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status, indicating lower SES status. Both SES (b= .21) and emerging adult status (b= .11) positively predicted risky alcohol use. However, there was no support that emerging adult status moderated the association between SES and risky alcohol use (b = .001 for the a*b path, p =.82) Model fit was excellent (i.e., GFI = 1.0, RMSE ~ 0.000, CFI ~ 1.0). The full three factor model did fit the data significantly better than the single-factor solution (X² with p<.000).

DISCUSSION/IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: This study found support for the direct effects of SES and emerging adult status on substance use. However, there was no evidence that SES moderated the association between emerging adult status and risky alcohol use. Although the association between emerging adult status and risky alcohol use is modest in size, the effect appears to be generalizable across socioeconomic strata. Future research should check whether these findings are robust to alternative measures of SES (i.e., income based or public benefit receipt) and different sampling strategies (i.e., not an on-line sample).