using a long time interval for measuring influence of the friend’s drinking behavior in the present study might make the influence of this friend doubtful, considering that the friendship might be terminated shortly after the first measurement. Therefore it seems necessary to ensure that this friendship is still existent at the second wave when using a long time interval. We assume, that by using a half-year interval between the waves, we found a good balance, preventing disadvantages of too short or too long time intervals.
In the current study, we concentrated on adolescents in the age group from 12 to 14. This was done because at this age many young people initiate drinking and peer influence may be an important mediator in this process. One may wonder if the same results would have been found when another age group was studied. It is known that especially during this period of life, people are extremely sensitive to other persons’ opinions about their behavior (Finkenauer et al., 2002). Still, it is possible that effects of peer influences in older adolescents may even be stronger, because in this group drinking becomes more regular and consequently a larger variation in alcohol consumption will be found, which may provide stronger results. Besides this, older adolescents are likely to be more autonymous, which may result in less impact from parents’ regulations and monitoring on the drinking behavior of the adolescents (Cottrell, Li, Harris, D’Allessandri, Atkins, Richardson & Stanton, 2003).
This decrease of impact will possibly make way for an increase in peer socialization and as a result more influence from friends may take place.
In this paper, we suggested that adolescents might perceive change of drinking behavior as an instrument to obtain reciprocal friendships. One may wonder if this instrument is effective. Aloise-Young, Graham and Hansen (1994) showed that those adolescents who adapted their smoking behavior toward the behavior of the desired friend were more likely to be reciprocated as a friend one year later. Bot and Engels (in preparation) scrutinized whether this process also takes place in drinking behavior. They found that differences in intensity of drinking was no ground for breaking up a
friendship, but differences in frequency of drinking was. Both similarity and adaptation to the
consumption of the best friend over time did not predict reciprocity of friendship for former unilateral and reciprocal friends.
It is peculiar to perceive that adolescents seem to change their intensity of drinking towards that of their best friend, without this change being helpful in establishing and keeping reciprocal friendships. One can conclude that construction of friendships is perhaps not the driving force behind copying behavior, but socialization as it is. The behavior of the best friend may be considered to be the norm and may be modeled, without fear for exclusion or strategy for inclusion as a cause. Another possibility is that adolescents assume changes in drinking to be a helpful technique in obtaining reciprocal friendships. Whether adolescents are aware of the possible pointlessness of this behavior or assume it will be helpful is a question yet to be answered.
Limitations
Despite the efforts we made to make this study a valuable contribution to the literature on peer influence on alcohol consumption, some limitations have to be mentioned. To begin with, the variance in alcohol consumption accounted for by the drinking behaviour of the best friend is modest.
However, by doing longitudinal analyses and correcting for earlier behaviour, the found variance may safely be interpreted as the result of friend’s drinking and not the result of some artefact. But, it remains useful to stay receptive to other factors that may influence youngsters’ alcohol consumption
Many adolescents in this study still were abstainers or sporadic users of alcohol during the measurements of this study. This could have influenced the results. Many of the changes in alcohol consumption probably were transformations from abstination to use. One can argue that this might be a different process than changing from drinking infrequently to drinking regularly.
Another possible limitation of this study was that only the alcohol consumption of the best friend in school was available for analysis. The design of our study did not permit us to collect data of friends outside school. This might lead to an underestimation of the influence of friends because some studies provided preliminary evidence that friends in out-of-school contexts are more strongly
affecting deviant behaviors of adolescents than friend at school (Mahoney & Stattin, 2000). On the other hand, friends in different classes, but within the same school could be traced and, at the age of our respondents, adolescents have the majority of their friends in school (Ennett & Bauman, 1994).
In future studies, it might be interesting to look at influence processes while they occur.
Asking adolescents to indicate how much they have been drinking in the past week namely does not give a good insight in the situations where the influence occurs. It makes quiet a difference whether an adolescent has e.g. 14 alcoholic consumptions per week by drinking two consumptions a day in the presence of the parents or as a consequence of going out heavily one night a week with a group of friends.
In sum, this study showed that the nature and quality of social relations, such as friendship characteristics, do matter when it comes to social influence on drinking behavior. This is an important detail to take into account when doing research and when developing interventions. It places attention to the need to concentrate future research on the individual and group characteristics that place adolescents at risk for peer influence processes.
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