Friend's drinking behaviour and adolescent alcohol consumption: The moderating role of friendship characteristics

Friends are presumed to exert a substantial influence on young people's drinking patterns. The current study focused on the effects of the best friend's drinking behaviour on the alcohol consumption of 12-14-year-old adolescents. Furthermore, we hypothesized friendship characteristics (i.e., reciprocity and sociometric status differences) to moderate the extent in which adolescents had been influenced by their best friends. Longitudinal data of 1276 adolescents and their best friends were used to examine whether the adolescent's friend's drinking behaviour, reciprocity of the friendship, and status differences between friends affected the magnitude of change in the adolescent's drinking behaviour. The findings showed that best friend's drinking behaviour is related to adolescent's drinking both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Cross-sectionally, this association was particularly strong between mutual friends and friends with lower status. In longitudinal analyses, a different picture emerged. Respondents were most likely to adopt their friend's drinking behaviour when it was a unilateral friend with a higher status.