The Impact of Socio-Economic Status on Adolescent Drinking Behaviour

Several contributions in this volume have shown that alcohol use among young people is associated with a wide range of social, psychological and cultural factors (adult drinking patterns and attitudes towards drinking in a country, adolescents’ own expectancies regarding alcohol use and intoxication, gender roles, and so on). The main focus of the present chapter is on the relationship between adolescent drinking behaviour and parental occupational and family affluence. Numerous public health studies have shown that these determinants, which compose the individual socio-economic status (SES) within a society, have a profound influence on mortality and morbidity in adulthood (Macintyre, 1997; Adler and Ostrove, 1999; Mackenbach et al., 2002). Those with lower socio-economic status are consistently found to be more likely to be ill, to require medical attention, to suffer more severe and chronic illness and to die from a range of causes at a younger age. While these patterns are well established, our understanding of the underlying mechanisms are less clear. One approach to explaining social class effects has been to focus on health-related behaviours and how they vary across socio-economic groups. Several researchers have indeed found a steep social gradient in adult lifestyle patterns: the lower the socio-economic status, the higher the risk for health-damaging behaviours and their associated biomedical risk factors (Crum et al., 1993; Cavelaars et al., 1997; Droomers et al., 1999; Tyroler, 1999). Thus, it is argued that behavioural factors such as smoking, malnutrition, excessive consumption of alcohol and lack of physical activity play a major role in the explanation of these social inequalities in health (Stronks et al., 1996; Denton and Walters, 1999; Richter and Mielck, 2000).