Effects of Deviant Peer Association on Adolescent AlcoholConsumption: A Growth Mixture Modeling Analysis

摘要

This study examined concurrent and laggedeffects of deviant peer association on levels of alcohol usefor distinctive trajectories of drinking from ages14-18 years, while controlling for age, paternal education,community size, and conduct problems. Longitudinal datawere available from a secondary data archive of male andfemale German adolescents (N = 1,619). Conditionallatent growth mixture modeling analysis indicated consis-tent concurrent effects of deviant peer association(specified as time-varying covariate) on alcohol use for theregular users group, but not any of the other drinking tra-jectory groups. Very few lagged effects of deviant peersassociation on alcohol use were found, and thus the socialinfluence hypothesis received little empirical support.Overall, findings suggest the need to consider heterogene-ity in the study of peer characteristics and alcohol use forboth male and female adolescents.