Drinking and Alcoholism in Young Men - A National Study

Blane, Howard

Abstract

To extend understanding about the psychosocial pathogenesis of alcoholic disorders and to establish prevalence rates for alcoholic disorders among young men, stratified for age, intensive personal interviews will be conducted with 800 men, chosen from a nationally representative sample of men between the ages of 20 and 27 years in the National Longitudinal Survey of Young People directed by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Respondents will include 400 social drinkers (SDs) and 400 frequent heavy drinker (FHDs), defined as drinking 6 or more drinks/occasion at least once/week. Information relative to understanding frequent heavy drinking, drinking problems, and alcoholic disorders in young adult males will be collected, covering familial, personality-cognitive, social-behavioral, and drinking domains. Key variables include family alcoholism history, parental drinking behavior, and parental general and drinking specific controls; life experiences and general and drinking-specific social support; assertive and heterosexual social skills; aggression, depression, social anxiety, and self-consciousness, and drinking expectancies in these areas; and drinking behavior including effects on sexual performance, assertiveness, self-awareness, and aggression. Diagnostic assessment of alcoholic disorders will draw upon the DSM-111 distinction between alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence and will be based upon psychometric assessments (MAST, Alcohol Dependence Scale, Serious Alcohol Incidents) and clinical interviews; the reliability and validity of diagnostic categorizations will be established by several techniques. Differences among SD, FHD, abuse, and dependence groups will be assessed with MANCOVA; the combination of variables which best discriminate among these groups will be identified. Also, a typology of young adult male drinkers will be developed, using cluster analytic techniques; resulting clusters will be externally validated and cross-validated by a split sample technique. Further, weighted rates of alcoholic disorders will be established to reflect the general population of young adult males from which the sample was drawn. The findings of the project will advance our empirical-conceptual understanding of drinking and alcoholic disorders among young men and will provide a basis for future longitudinal research on how their drinking problems evolve, how they change in relation to other characteristics in men's lives, and the extent to which heavy drinking in young males is a risk factor for subsequent alcoholism.