Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

, Volume 43, Issue 6, pp 1131–1143 | Cite as

Selection and Socialization Effects in Early Adolescent Alcohol Use: A Propensity Score Analysis

  • Matthew D. Scalco
  • Elisa M. Trucco
  • Donna L. Coffman
  • Craig R. Colder
Article
First Online:

Abstract

The robust correlation between peer and adolescent alcohol use (AU) has been taken as evidence for both socialization and selection processes in the etiology of adolescent AU. Accumulating evidence from studies using a diverse range of methodological and statistical approaches suggests that both processes are involved. A major challenge in testing whether peer AU predicts an adolescent’s drinking (socialization) or whether an adolescent’s drinking predicts peer AU (selection) is the myriad of potentially confounding factors that might lead to an overestimation of socialization and selection effects. After creating AU transition groups based on peer and adolescent AU across two waves (N = 765; age = 10–15; 53 % female), we test whether transitions into AU by adolescents and peers predict later peer and adolescent AU respectively, using (1) propensity score analysis to balance transition groups on 26 potential confounds, (2) a longitudinal design with three waves to establish temporal precedence, and (3) both adolescent (target) and peer self-report of peer AU to disentangle effects attributable to shared reporter bias. Both selection and socialization were supported using both peer self-report of AU and adolescent-report of peer AU. Although cross-sectional analyses suggested peer self-reported models were associated with smaller effects than perceived peer AU, longitudinal analyses suggest a similar sized effect across reporter of peer AU for both selection and socialization. The implications of these findings for the etiology and treatment of adolescent AU are discussed.

Keywords

Adolescence Alcohol use Selection Socialization Influence Propensity scores 
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Notes

Author Note

This research was funded by two grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01 DA020171 and R01 DA019631) awarded to Dr. Craig R. Colder.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

10802_2014_9969_MOESM1_ESM.pdf (69 kb)
ESM 1 (PDF 69 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Matthew D. Scalco
    • 1
  • Elisa M. Trucco
    • 2
  • Donna L. Coffman
    • 3
  • Craig R. Colder
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of PsychologyState University of New York at BuffaloBuffaloUSA
  2. 2.Department of PsychologyUniversity of MichiganAnn ArborUSA
  3. 3.The Methodology CenterPenn State UniversityState CollegeUSA

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