News
IAS Report: Internet influences on adolescent attitudes to alcohol
With generous funding from Alcohol Research UK,
IAS has recently completed research on the influence of the Internet on
young peoples’ drinking and is today publishing the findings in a
report.
The Internet and New Media are ubiquitous in young
people’s lives today and there is evidence of a relationship between
adolescent exposure to alcohol media content and alcohol consumption.
This important study examines the prevalence and nature of actual
Internet content experienced by young people, rather than a general
count of alcohol instances as has been used in previous research.
The research also explored how young people responded to
those alcohol references, took measures of alcohol consumption and
examined implicit attitudes through an Implicit Attitude Test to provide an insight into the relationship between these factors.
Main findings
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The young people encountered significantly more online
alcohol content than non-alcoholic content and were more likely to
engage with the alcohol content.
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This content tended to be passive background references
that were received positively and participants mainly focused on the
aesthetics of the setting rather than contextual information. These
findings would suggest that cognitive uptake of online alcohol content
could occur very easily and possibly outside participants’ awareness.
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Those with more positive implicit attitudes were more
likely to consume more alcohol and there was an association between the
proportion of alcohol references and heavy episodic consumption. While
the analysis did not provide evidence of causality, results highlighted
how intertwined uptake of alcohol media content and implicit attitudes
to alcohol consumption are.
For a summary of the report, please click here (pdf 97kb)
For the full report, please click here. (pdf 1.2mb)
Please note, this report is the pre-publication full report, and may be abridged for peer review