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A Preliminary Examination of the Effects of Perceived Parent Approval toward Lower and Higher Risk Drinking Situations on Alcohol-Related Consequences in a Sample of Underage Adults
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Abstract
Parents of young adults may approve of their child drinking in lower risk drinking situations (LRDS) because they believe it will prevent their child from drinking in more risky ways. However, when young adults believe their parents approves of drinking in LRDS they experience more negative alcohol consequences, not less. A plausible explanation for the effects of LRDS on risky drinking is that approval toward LRDS implicitly suggests approval toward other drinking situations that most parents would not permit (i.e., higher risk drinking situations [HRDS]). The current study addresses a gap in the literature by investigating perceived parental approval of drinking in HRDS as a mediator of perceived LRDS approval on underage emerging adults’ (UEAs’) drinking and consequences. UEAs (18–20 years of age) were recruited from all 50 states via MTurk to complete a two-part web-based survey study (N=315). Measures included in the mediation model were perceived parental approval of drinking (both LRDS and HRDS related), peak drinking occasion consumption, alcohol-related consequences, and baseline covariates (birth sex and perceived peer drinking norms). Results from the mediation model revealed that perceived LRDS approval was associated with increases in perceived HRDS approval, which, in turn, predicted consequences (controlling for baseline peak drinking, consequences, and covariates). Findings from this study provide the first evidence to support perceived HRDS approval as a mechanism through which LRDS approval influences alcohol-related consequences. These results suggest that PBIs may benefit from targeting parent approval toward both LRDS and HRDS.
... To demonstrate the validity of the single-item measure of permissiveness used here, we conducted exploratory analyses using data collected for another project (N = 315, M age = 19.28, SD = 0.77, 52.9% male; Trager et al., 2022) to determine if a 13item measure of perceived parent permissiveness toward drinking developed for young adults (α = .94) was more strongly correlated with typical weekly drinking than the single-item measure used here. ...
Objective:
Whether college students' reports of their parents' behaviors are as reliable a predictor of student drinking as their parents' own reports remains an open question and a point of contention in the literature. To address this, the current study examined concordance between college student and mother/father reports of the same parenting behaviors relevant to parent-based college drinking interventions (relationship quality, monitoring, and permissiveness), and the extent to which student and parent reports differed in their relation to college drinking and consequences.
Method:
The sample consisted of 1,429 students and 1,761 parents recruited from three large public universities in the United States (814 mother-daughter, 563 mother-son, 233 father-daughter, and 151 father-son dyads). Students and their parents were each invited to complete four surveys over the course of the students' first four years of college (one survey per year).
Results:
Paired samples t-tests revealed that parent reports of parenting constructs were typically more conservative than student reports. Intraclass correlations revealed moderate associations between parent and student reports on quality of parenting, general monitoring, and permissiveness. The associations between parenting constructs and drinking and consequences were also consistent when using parent and student reports of permissiveness. Results were generally consistent for all four types of dyads, and at each of the four time points.
Conclusions:
Taken together, these findings provide additional support for the use of student reports of parental behaviors as a valid proxy of parents' actual reports and as a reliable predictor of college student drinking and consequences.
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