Abstract
Introduction and Aims: Adolescent drinking has decreased in numerous high‐income countries in the 2000s, and how to explain this downward trend is far from clear. Focussing on the decline in drinking to intoxication among youth in Norway, we examined the following potential explanatory factors: family/home‐based and peer‐oriented leisure‐time activities, perceived parental drinking, drug substitution, school conscientiousness and delinquency.
Design and Methods: Data stemmed from cross‐sectional surveys of adolescents aged 13–17 years in the four largest cities in Norway in 2002 (n = 1204) and in 2013/2015 (n = 31 441). We examined the extent to which the decline in intoxication prevalence was attributable to the possible explanatory variables using logistic regression analysis.
Results: The proportion reporting any past‐year intoxication episodes dropped markedly from 2002 (41%) to 2013/2015 (22%). Family/home‐oriented leisure‐time activities and school conscientiousness increased, whereas hanging out with friends in the evening and delinquent behaviours decreased. These factors together accounted for 43% of this decline. Decrease in going out with friends was the most important factor. We found no empirical support for assumptions that perceived parental drinking or drug substitution had contributed to the decrease in drinking to intoxication.
Discussion and Conclusions: Since the millennium shift, urban adolescents in Norway have become more home‐, family‐ and school‐oriented, and less involved in unsupervised socialising with peers and delinquency. These changes may have contributed to some of the reduction in the prevalence of intoxication in this population group.
DISCUSSION
The intoxication frequency among urban adolescents in Norway decreased substantially from 2002 to 2013/2015. Concomitantly, adolescents' leisure‐time activities, school commitment and delinquent behaviour also changed markedly. We found no empirical support for assumptions that parents had modified their own drinking practice, or that adolescents substituted alcohol with cannabis. However, substantial changes in leisure‐time activities, school conscientiousness and delinquency could explain—in statistical terms—a large proportion of the decrease in drinking to intoxication.
The sizable temporal changes, both in adolescent drinking and in factors associated with drinking, corroborate the research findings from many countries [1]. Thus, concurrent with the downward drinking trend in the 2000s, substantial cross‐national changes in adolescents' lifestyles, leisure‐time activities and priorities have occurred. First, most studies indicate that hanging out with friends in the evenings occurs less frequently [14, 17, 18], and that a marked increase in time spent on screen activities has occurred [28]. Some studies have also found an increase in spending time with parents [17, 29], as well as other changes that are indicative of closer ties to parents [30, 31]. This fits a broader picture of improved parenting and family relationships. Parents' knowledge about their adolescent offspring's whereabouts has increased, and alcohol‐specific parenting practices have become more restrictive [6, 11-13]. At least in the Nordic countries, it seems that young people want to perform better at school than previously, with higher academic ambitions [8, 32], which fits our findings of more school conscientiousness. Finally, and well in line with the above‐mentioned changes in young people's lives, delinquency and other risk‐taking behaviours have declined in several countries [8, 10, 30, 31], as we also found.
The single most important factor to explain the decline in drinking in our study was the decrease in time hanging out with friends in the evening. Some previous studies [14, 17-19] have also found that a decrease in hanging out with friends contributed to a decrease in drinking. The decrease in unsupervised socialising with peers probably implies fewer opportunities for drinking to intoxication. It has been suggested that the rise in time spent on using information and communication technologies is important in this regard, as adolescents have become too busy with their media pursuits at the expense of activities, such as substance use, that typically occur in face‐to‐face social interactions [7, 10]. However, the extant body of research does not support this assumption [19, 33], and a possible role of the use of digital media in this regard may be complex [1].
We also found that indicators of school conscientiousness accounted for a sizable part of the drop in intoxication prevalence. Truancy has also previously been shown to be of some importance in this regard [12, 14]. We found that the time spent on homework increased and that school misconduct decreased, and that these changes also contributed to explain the drop in drinking to intoxication. This fits well with a recent finding that a stronger emphasis on academic performance is not compatible with heavy alcohol consumption and frequent drinking to intoxication [32]. Hegna et al. [34] noted that the ‘educational explosion’ over the past few decades has left fewer options for those who do not complete senior high school, and it has been claimed that this has led to a more ‘conformist’ youth generation [35]. Our finding of a decrease in delinquency fits well into the picture of a more conformist lifestyle.
Several studies indicate that increased parental knowledge and stricter alcohol‐specific parenting have contributed to the downward drinking trend [6, 11-13]. Kraus et al . [7] suggested that parents have also become less likely to drink in front of their adolescent children. However, we found no empirical support for this suggestion, as perceived parental drinking frequency did not change. On the other hand, we observed an increase in time spent on activities with parents. This observation is in line with previous findings of changes in family dynamics and closer parent–child relationships [7, 17, 29-31], which are predictive of reduced drinking [16, 36]. These changes could also account for some of the reduction in intoxication frequency, and may suggest that adolescents' leisure time to a lesser extent includes social situations compatible with drinking, but rather favours ‘competing activities’ [37].
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