Effects of Deviant Peer Association on Adolescent Alcohol Consumption: A Growth Mixture Modeling AnalysisJournal of Youth and Adolescence Volume 37, Number 5 / May, 2008, pp. 537-551
This study examined concurrent and lagged effects of deviant peer association on levels of alcohol use for distinctive trajectories of drinking from ages 14–18 years, while controlling for age, paternal education, community size, and conduct problems.
Longitudinal data were available from a secondary data archive of male and female German adolescents (N = 1,619).
Conditional latent growth mixture modeling analysis indicated consistent concurrent effects of deviant peer association (specified as time-varying covariate) on alcohol use for the regular users group, but not any of the other drinking trajectory groups.
Very few lagged effects of deviant peers association on alcohol use were found, and thus the social influence hypothesis received little empirical support.
Overall, findings suggest the need to consider heterogeneity in the study of peer characteristics and alcohol use for both male and female adolescents.
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