Intergenerational Transmission of Alcohol Use in Adolescents: Drinking Motives as a Potential Mediator in a Child Welfare Sample
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The association between parent and offspring alcohol use is well supported. The present study extended previous research (Muller Kuntsche, 2011; Van Damme et al., 2015) that found that drinking motives mediate this association in the general population by examining the pathway in a sample of severely maltreated child welfare-involved adolescents. The present study investigated whether the association between parental alcohol problems and adolescent alcohol use was mediated by the extent to which adolescents reported coping motives for drinking, and whether that mediation was moderated by the amount of time youth had spent in the care of child protective services. Participants were 302 (58.3% female) Canadian youth aged 14-19 (M 15.86, SD 1.01) in the care of child welfare (28% had been in care for 10 years or more), part of the Maltreatment and Adolescent Pathways (MAP; See Wekerle, Leung, Goldstein, Thornton, Tonmyr, 2009) longitudinal study. Participants completed measures assessing their current alcohol use (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test; AUDIT-C; Dawson, Grant, Stinson, Zhou, 2005), coping motives for drinking (Drinking Motives Questionnaire, Revised; DMQ-R; Cooper, 1994), and mother and father alcohol problems (single alcoholism item, Short Michigan Alcohol Screening Test-Family; F-SMAST/M-SMAST; Crews Sher, 1992). Models were tested using a path analytic framework with the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2013). Results were examined separately for three groups: (a) the full sample; (b) drinkers only; and (c) male and female drinkers. The rate of alcohol use (55%) was low in the present sample relative to the norm. Results suggest that the association of fathersâ history of alcohol problems with offspring alcohol use is largely indirect, through coping motives, in youth who are in the care of child welfare (b = .082, 95% Bootstrapped CI [.024, .133], κ2 = .126, full sample). When examined by gender, the mediation held for female, but not male, adolescent drinkers. Analyses did not provide evidence of moderation of the indirect effect by time in care, suggesting that the mediation by coping motives of the relationship between paternal alcohol problems and female adolescent alcohol use is not contingent on time spent in care.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Ardith Baerveldt
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2611430575