The use of alcoholic beverages has generally been in decline among American teens for the last several years, and that decline continued in eighth, 10th and 12th graders in 2005.
That was the most recent finding of a University of Michigan study called Monitoring The Future (MTF). The study surveys nationally representative samples of about 50,000 students each year in about 400 public and private secondary schools.
MTF now spans a 30-year interval, having been launched in 1975. It has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), one of the National Institutes of Health, under a series of investigator-initiated, competitive research grants made to the University of Michigan.
There are a number of measures of alcohol use in the Monitoring The Future study, including: measures of any alcohol use in lifetime, past 12 months, and past 30 days; self-reported drunkenness in those same three prevalence periods; consuming five or more drinks in a row on one or more occasions in the prior two weeks, sometimes called "binge drinking"; and daily use in the prior 30 days. There are also some beverage-specific questions.
The 30-day prevalence of alcohol use among teens generally rose some in the early 1990s, along with illicit drug use, and then started to gradually decline in the late 1990s, again somewhat in parallel with illicit drug use. However, both the earlier rise and later declines were more gradual for alcohol than for illicit drug use.
Among eighth graders, 30-day prevalence has now declined by 35 percent since its peak level in 1996, but for 10th and 12th graders the proportional declines from recent peaks are considerably less--down by 19 percent since 2000, and down by 11 percent since 1997, respectively.
In 2005 one-sixth (17 percent) of the eighth graders indicated drinking once or more in the prior 30 days, as did a third (33 percent) of the 10th graders, and nearly half (47 percent) of the 12th graders.
In 2005 nearly all prevalence measures showed some decline at all grade levels, with a number of those one-year declines reaching statistical significance. The single exception was for daily use, which showed little change this year in any grade.
Self-reported drunkenness also showed some decline across the board this year with the exception of daily drunkeness, which showed little change. Despite some decline in 2005, the prevalence of drunkenness actually has declined rather little over the past couple of years.
Perceived availability of alcohol has been declining steadily among eighth graders since 1997 and has declined a bit among 10th graders since 2001. (Over 90 percent of 12th graders report that alcohol is readily available, and that has not changed in recent years.)
While the prevalence rate for beer has fallen from recent peaks by between 19 percent and 32 percent, the prevalence of hard liquor consumption has fallen among 12th graders (the only ones asked about their hard liquor use) by only 2 percent.
Past 30-day prevalence of the use of flavored alcoholic beverages (sometimes called alcopops or malternatives) showed a nonsignificant decline in all three grades in 2005. Overall, use of this class of beverages does not seem to be expanding rapidly, as some had feared when the study first introduced questions about their use in 2003.
Source: American Beverage Licensees Leader, March, 2006, published monthly by Continental Communications, 800-406-5698, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.