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Long-term Associations Between Substance Use-Related Media Exposure, Descriptive Norms, and Alcohol Use from Adolescence to Young Adulthood

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Abstract

Adolescents and young adults in the United States are constantly exposed to substance-related media and advertising content. The current study seeks to explore, developmentally, how exposure to substance-related media content influences both normative beliefs about peer alcohol use and individual alcohol use. Youth (N = 4‚840; 50.6% female) were followed for ten years from age 12 to 22. Auto-regressive latent trajectory with structured residual (ALT-SR) models were used to explore within-person reciprocal associations between substance-related media content, descriptive norms, and alcohol use. Results indicated that‚ across adolescence and young adulthood, exposure to substance-related media content was associated with increased alcohol use via perceived alcohol norms. The pathway from media exposure to alcohol use was mediated by increased perceived norms for adolescents only. With screen time increasing over the last decade, it is important to invest resources into real-time interventions that address substance-related social media content as it relates to misperceived norms and to begin these interventions in early adolescence.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the districts and schools who participated and supported this project. We would also like to thank Kirsten Becker and Jen Parker of the RAND Survey Research Group for overseeing the school survey administrations and the web based surveys.

Authors’ Contributions

J.P.D. conceived of the study, participated in its design, conducted statistical analyses, and drafted the manuscript; E.R.P. participated in the design and interpretation of the data and drafted parts of the manuscript; J.S.T. participated in the design and coordination of the study and edited manuscript; M.S.D. edited and helped draft the manuscript; R.S. helped to draft the manuscript; E.J.D. helped in the study design, interpretation of results, and edited manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by three grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health (R01AA016577; R01AA020883; R01AA025848: D’Amico).

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  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Jordan P. Davis

  2. RAND Corporation, 1776 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA, 90401, USA

    Eric R. Pedersen, Joan S. Tucker, Rachana Seelam, Regina Shih & Elizabeth J. D’Amico

  3. RAND Corporation, 4570 Fifth Ave #600, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Michael S. Dunbar & Regina Shih

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Davis, J.P., Pedersen, E.R., Tucker, J.S. et al. Long-term Associations Between Substance Use-Related Media Exposure, Descriptive Norms, and Alcohol Use from Adolescence to Young Adulthood. J Youth Adolescence 48, 1311–1326 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01024-z

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