Exposure to Parental Alcohol Use Rather Than Parental Drinking Shapes Offspring’s Alcohol Expectancies

Abstract

Background: Alcohol expectancies (AE), that is, the anticipated effects of alcohol, start developing early in childhood and are important predictors of alcohol use years later. Whereas previous research has demonstrated that parental drinking relates to children’s AE, this study aims to test whether exposure to parental alcohol use mediates the link between parental alcohol use and positive and negative AE among children (6 to 8 years) and early adolescents (12 to 15 years).

Methods:

STUDY 1

In short: The data of this multi-informant longitudinal family study were collected during yearly home visits (2015-2017, T0-T2). Children completed a task on a tablet while parents completed online questionnaires around alcohol use, exposure and other lifestyle related variables (see dataset Analyzing family_wave 123_newvar_2.sav). Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) performed in Mplus 7.4 (Muthén and Muthén, 2010) to test the hypothesized mediation of parental alcohol exposure (T1) on the links from parental alcohol use (T1) to children’s AE (T2).

STUDY 2

In short: the current study exists of a three-year longitudinal study, involving multiple data acquisition waves among multiple informants, i.e., adolescents and their mothers. Questionnaires were produced in Qualtrics for both. Starting in May 2015 (cohort 1) and November 2015 (cohort 2), over a period of 36 months, young adolescents are asked to complete questionnaires every six months (seven times in total) and the mothers are asked to complete questionnaires online annually (four times in total). NB. As this is only data used for this specific study, the questionnaire data for the full longitudinal study can be found in the linked dataset named "Vidi Kuntsche_Project B"

The same strategy for analysis was applied for both studies. First, descriptive analyses were conducted. Second, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesized mediation of parental alcohol exposure (T2) on the links from parental alcohol use (T2) to adolescents’ AE (T4).