Pathways to adolescent alcohol use: Potential mechanisms of parent influence

The purpose of this study was to clarify parents' role in the initiation of alcohol use of young adolescents. Subjects included 413 adolescent-parent dyads in which the youth had not begun drinking at the end of 6th grade. Al l dyads were participants in Project Northland (PN), an adolescent alcohol use prevention trial. A proposed etiologic model including parent norms rel ated to underage drinking, household alcohol-related problems, family probl ems, and potential mediators of parent influence was tested using structura l equation modeling techniques. To explore model differences between interv ention conditions, separate models were estimated for intervention and refe rence samples. Among the parent constructs modeled, parent norms around und erage drinking exhibited the strongest relationships with 7th- and 8th-grad e alcohol use. Parent norms were directly related to adolescents' alcohol-r elated cognitions, and thereby had a significant indirect relationship with teenagers' alcohol use. No significant differences were found between inte rvention and reference groups in model-specified pathways to alcohol use.