Despite the current societal concern with underage drinking, little attention has been paid to alcohol use within the preadolescent population. This article presents the proceedings of a symposium held at the 2003 Research Society on Alcoholism meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that was organized and chaired by John E. Donovan. The intent of the symposium was to kick start research on alcoho...

BACKGROUND We assessed associations between educational achievement and alcohol consumption. METHODS We employed five alcohol consumption measures (length of time of and amount consumed during most recent drinking occasion, frequency of alcohol consumption, heavy episodic drinking, problem drinking); and three educational achievement indicators (students' subjective importance of achieving go...

National surveys of adolescents, college students, and other young adults in the United States reveal high rates of alcohol use among these age groups as well as high rates of dangerous drinking practices such as binge drinking and daily drinking. Additional health-compromising behaviors such as tobacco use and drinking and driving often co-occur with alcohol use in these populations. The physi...

INTRODUCTION Alcohol use, alcohol misuse, and risky driving from adolescence into young adulthood were compared by drinking onset age. METHODS Surveys were administered in Grades 5/6, 6/7, 7/8, 10, 12, and at approximately age 23. Participants were placed into Drinking Onset groups based on self-reported alcohol use frequency on the adolescent surveys. Driving records were examined in three a...

BACKGROUND Uni-dimensional measures of alcohol consumption may be unable to fully capture the complexity of adolescent drinking and experience of alcohol-related harms. Latent class analysis provides an empirical method to understand different adolescent drinking patterns. METHODS Latent class analysis was used to create typologies of drinking among the 5018 current drinkers in the national Y...

Although drinking motives have been shown to influence drinking behavior among women with trauma histories and PTSD, no known research has examined the influence of drinking motives on alcohol use and alcohol-related consequences for women with PTSD as compared to women with a trauma history but no PTSD and women with no trauma history. Therefore, the present study sought to examine the associa...

OBJECTIVE To examine the associations between displayed alcohol use and intoxication/problem drinking (I/PD) references on Facebook and self-reported problem drinking using a clinical scale. DESIGN Content analysis and cross-sectional survey. SETTING Facebook Web site (http://www.facebook.com/). PARTICIPANTS The study included undergraduate students (age range, 18-20 years) at 2 state uni...

OBJECTIVE Alcohol misuse is substantially influenced by social factors, but systematic assessments of social network drinking are typically lengthy. The goal of the present study was to provide further validation of a brief measure of social network alcohol use, the Brief Alcohol Social Density Assessment (BASDA), in a sample of emerging adults. Specifically, the study sought to examine the BAS...

Native Americans have the highest rates of alcohol use in comparison to other ethnic groups, placing them at risk for experiencing alcohol-related problems. The present study examined the beliefs that some Native Americans may have related to alcohol use; specifically, the belief that alcohol is a key component in Native American cultures. To assess these beliefs, we developed the Stereotypical...

BACKGROUND Few studies have reported on the outcomes of outpatient alcohol treatment or the factors associated with effective treatment. We investigated treatment outcome, treatment retention, and their predictors in clients receiving outpatient treatment for alcohol misuse. METHODS Naturalistic, longitudinal multi-centre study in Switzerland that included 858 clients receiving outpatient tre...