Abstract
In this article, we highlight the urgent public health need for prevention of heavy episodic drinking among underage Hispanic emerging adults in the USA. We outline the current state of binge drinking prevention programming and contrast it with the unique cultural, social, and developmental realities of this population using an ecodevelopmental framework (Szapocznik and Coatsworth 1999). Finally, we advance specific recommendations for the development and delivery of culturally tailored, multisystemic binge drinking prevention programs for underage Hispanic emerging adults.
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There is a lack of definitional agreement in the field regarding how intense drinking episodes should be regarded and labeled, and this lack of agreement leads to some ambiguities in measurement of these episodes. Some leading writers operationalize heavy episodic drinking (HED) as the frequency of consuming five or more drinks on a single occasion (Mulia et al. 2009; Kilmer et al. 2014), whereas the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) use a similar definition to denote binge drinking (BD). For the purpose of capturing the phenomenon of problematic intensive drinking throughout this article, we will use both terms interchangeably.
The terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” are used interchangeably.
The term “underage emerging adults (UAEs)” is used in reference to emerging adults between the ages of 18 and 20, and the term“emerging adults (EAs)” is utilized to mark the full developmental period of emerging adulthood (between 18 and 25 years of age).
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Petrova, M., Martinez, C.R., Jean-Jacques, J. et al. Mind the Gap: Bridging the Divide Between Current Binge Drinking Prevention and the Needs of Hispanic Underage Emerging Adults. Prev Sci 20, 1114–1124 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-019-01026-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-019-01026-0