Alcohol use is prevalent among post-secondary students and negatively impacts their academic achievement. Socially constructed gender-based perceptions can promote alcohol misuse on campus. This is a community-based participatory action research aiming to raise awareness of alcohol use and its relation to gender, bridge campus networks targeting…

Higher accepted friends are known to influence the alcohol misuse of lower accepted friends, but not the reverse. The present study was designed to address the origins of this influence: Are higher accepted friends particularly "influential" or are lower accepted friends particularly "susceptible" to influence? To address this…

Purpose: This paper explores the impact of a suite of alcohol culture change interventions implemented by Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. The interventions were designed to change the alcohol culture at a bi-annual nation-wide university multi-sport competition known as Uni Nationals. This study aims to understand the critical success…

Purpose: Many existing interventions to reduce excessive drinking in university students attempt to target individual cognitions, which ignore the wider contextual features that drive excessive drinking and mark this as an important aspect of university life. The purpose of this paper is to explore students' views about preventing excessive…

Background: The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between drinking motives and interpretation bias (interpreting ambiguous stimuli in an alcohol-related way) in problematic drinkers with and without mild to borderline intellectual disability (MBID). Method: Participants (N = 178) were divided into 4 groups based on severity of…

Social influences together with local cultural norms are central factors that can influence the use of alcohol. The study, therefore, identified socio-cultural norms and roles capable of influencing alcohol use among young people in an alcohol producing community, in Nigeria. We used qualitative technique--focused group discussions among selected…

Women are more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol than men. They get intoxicated more quickly and have a higher blood alcohol level than men, even when body weight and alcohol consumption are the same. Despite this we are seeing a convergence of the drinking patterns of young women and young men, including binge drinking. In this research, 20…

Aim: To report baseline findings and discuss their implications for the transferability of the predominantly American "Social Norms" approach to alcohol misuse prevention to a UK (Scottish) secondary school setting. Design, setting, participants and measurement: Baseline data from a 3-year control case study are reported here, and data…

Although drinking motives have been largely studied, research taking into account the Mediterranean drinking culture and focusing on motives specifically associated to adolescents' developmental tasks is lacking. For these reasons the study investigates drinking motives in a group of Italian adolescents and their relationships with drunkenness and…

The social norms approach to health promotion has become remarkably popular in the last 20 years, particularly in the American college system. It is an alternative to traditional fear-based approaches of health education, which a growing body of research demonstrates is often ineffective in reducing alcohol and drug misuse. The social norms…

This cross-sectional study investigated the bivariate and more fully controlled (with socio-demographic measures) relationship between self-reported drinking behaviour and peer pressure susceptibility, desire for peer popularity and general conformity in a sample of 11-16-year-old school children in Northern Ireland. Self-reported drinking…

Selection and socialization have been implicated in friendship homophily, but the relative contributions of each are difficult to measure simultaneously because of the nonindependent nature of the data. To address this problem, the authors applied a multiple-groups longitudinal actor-partner interdependence model (D. A. Kashy & D. A. Kenny,…

Alcohol abuse and truancy are two widespread problems among the adolescent Spanish population. Given the negative consequences of both behaviours for human capital acquiring and their origin in adolescence, our study lies in analysing the relationship between these risk behaviours. From a methodological point of view, our contribution consists of…

Adolescents tend to overestimate peer drinking; the resulting misperception of the social norm predicts the child's own future drinking. This study examined the misperception's relatedness to a person's drinking pattern in order to facilitate the segmentation of the audience for health education interventions. Adolescent Health and Lifestyle…

Asserts that alcohol and drug abuse among Russian adolescents and young adults is a social disaster. Reviews results of study of parents and teachers which indicates that drugs and alcohol are considered major problems in Russian schools. Finds that both teachers and parents believe that parental use of alcohol is a primary factor in student…