Original article
Ecological Momentary Assessment of the Association Between Exposure to Alcohol Advertising and Early Adolescents' Beliefs About Alcohol

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2015.08.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Purpose

To evaluate the momentary association between exposure to alcohol advertising and middle-school students' beliefs about alcohol in real-world settings and to explore racial/ethnic differences in this association.

Methods

Middle-school students (N = 588) carried handheld data collection devices for 14 days, recording their exposures to all forms of alcohol advertising during the assessment period. Students also responded to three investigator-initiated control prompts (programmed to occur randomly) on each day of the assessment period. After each exposure to advertising and at each control prompt, students reported their beliefs about alcohol. Mixed-effects regression models compared students' beliefs about alcohol between moments of exposure to alcohol advertising and control prompts.

Results

Students perceived the typical person their age who drinks alcohol (prototype perceptions) more favorably and perceived alcohol use as more normative at times of exposure to alcohol advertising than at times of nonexposure (i.e., at control prompts). Exposure to alcohol advertising was not associated with shifts in the perceived norms of black and Hispanic students, however, and the association between exposure and prototype perceptions was stronger among non-Hispanic students than among Hispanic students.

Conclusions

Exposure to alcohol advertising is associated with acute shifts in adolescents' perceptions of the typical person that drinks alcohol and the normativeness of drinking. These associations are both statistically and substantively meaningful.

Section snippets

Participants

We recruited 606 middle-school students from two large school districts, after school clubs and community organizations in Southern California with flyers and other notices. Enrollment occurred on a rolling basis over 10 months (September 2013–June 2014). We talked with parents by phone to determine children's eligibility. Children were eligible if they were aged 11–14 years, could speak and write English, and had no psychological condition that would preclude participation. Multiple children

Results

Characteristics of the analysis sample are shown in Table 1. Five participants lost or broke their device and thus, their data were irretrievable. An additional 12 participants did not respond to any of the random prompts and one student withdrew from the study. Data from these 18 participants were not included in the analyses described here. The remaining 588 participants were about evenly distributed across ages 11–14 years, slightly less than half were female, and Hispanics, non-Hispanic

Discussion

Cognitive social learning and decision-making theories emphasize the role of immediate cognitive reactions to alcohol advertisements as drivers of adolescents' decisions to drink. However, momentary associations between exposure to advertising and beliefs about drinking have never been evaluated in real-world settings. Ours is the first study to use momentary data collected in naturalistic settings to characterize the temporal association between exposure to alcohol advertising and beliefs. We

Acknowledgments

We thank Barbara Hennessey, Richard Garvey, Christopher Corey, and Angel Martinez for their assistance in executing the procedures of this research.

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