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Thursday, July 9, 2009

Alcohol outcome expectancies as socially shared and socialized beliefs.
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. Vol 23(2), 2009, 248-259.

Alcohol expectancies are important predictors of alcohol involvement in both adolescents and adults, yet little research has examined the social origins and transmission of these beliefs. This paper examined alcohol outcome expectancies collected in a cohort-sequential longitudinal study of 452 families with children followed over seven waves.

Children increased their adoption of both the positive and negative consensual alcohol expectancies. Unconditional latent growth modeling showed that piece-wise growth models with a transition at age 12 fit the data best. Both the positive and negative consensual expectancies were adopted at a faster rate between ages 8.5 and 11.5 than between ages 12 and 13.5. For negative expectancies, there was no further growth between ages 12 and 13.5.

Taken together, these findings support the conceptualization of alcohol outcome expectancies as socially shared and transmitted beliefs.


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