Home > Drinking motives, personality traits, life stressors - identifying pathways to harmful alcohol use in adolescence using a panel network approach.

Freichel, René and Pfirrmann, Janine and Cousjin, Janna and de Jong, Peter and Franken, Ingmar and Banaschewski, Tobias and Bokde, Arun L W and Desrivières, Sylvane and Flor, Herta and Grigis, Antoine and Garavan, Hugh and Heinz, Andreas and Martinot, Jean-Luc and Martinot, Marie-Laure Paillère and Artiges, Eric and Nees, Frauke and Orfanos, Dimitri Papadopoulos and Poustka, Luise and Hohmann, Sarah and Fröhner, Juliane H and Smolka, Michael N and Vaidya, Nilakshi and Whelan, Robert and Schumann, Gunter and Walter, Henrik and Veer, Ilya M and Wiers, Reinout W (2023) Drinking motives, personality traits, life stressors - identifying pathways to harmful alcohol use in adolescence using a panel network approach. Addiction, 118, (10), pp. 1908-1919. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16231.

External website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Models of alcohol use risk suggest that drinking motives represent the most proximal risk factors on which more distal factors converge. However, little is known about how distinct risk factors influence each other and alcohol use on different temporal scales (within a given moment vs. over time). We aimed to estimate the dynamic associations of distal (personality and life stressors) and proximal (drinking motives) risk factors, and their relationship to alcohol use in adolescence and early adulthood using a novel graphical vector autoregressive (GVAR) panel network approach.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND CASES We estimated panel networks on data from the IMAGEN study, a longitudinal European cohort study following adolescents across three waves (ages 16, 19, 22). Our sample consisted of 1829 adolescents (51% females) who reported alcohol use on at least one assessment wave.

MEASUREMENTS Risk factors included personality traits (NEO-FFI: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; SURPS: impulsivity and sensation seeking), stressful life events (LEQ: sum scores of stressful life events), and drinking motives (DMQ: social, enhancement, conformity, coping anxiety, coping depression). We assessed alcohol use (AUDIT: quantity and frequency) and alcohol-related problems (AUDIT: related problems).

FINDINGS Within a given moment, social (partial correlation (pcor) =0.17) and enhancement motives (pcor=0.15) co-occurred most strongly with drinking quantity and frequency, while coping depression motives (pcor=0.13), openness (pcor=0.05), and impulsivity (pcor=0.09) were related to alcohol-related problems. The temporal network showed no predictive associations between distal risk factors and drinking motives. Social motives (beta=0.21), previous alcohol use (beta=0.11), and openness (beta=0.10) predicted alcohol-related problems over time (all p<0.01).

CONCLUSIONS Heavy and frequent alcohol use, along with social drinking motives, appear to be key targets for preventing the development of alcohol-related problems throughout late adolescence. We found no evidence for personality traits and life stressors predisposing towards distinct drinking motives over time.


Item Type
Article
Publication Type
Irish-related, International, Open Access, Article
Drug Type
Alcohol
Intervention Type
Harm reduction
Date
2023
Identification #
https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16231
Page Range
pp. 1908-1919
Publisher
Wiley
Volume
118
Number
10
EndNote

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