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Drinking
Careers: The Role of Social Networks
Principal
Investigator: Peter Nygaard, Ph.D.
The
focus of this 36 month study is on the role of social networks
on the development and maintenance of drinking careers. The
proposed project aims to identify drinking phases throughout
the drinking career of 50 subjects who have been diagnosed
with alcoholism or alcohol abuse and 50 subjects who are considered
social drinkers. Of particular interest in this project is
the change process when individuals leave one drinking phase
to enter another. Therefore, the project will focus on factors
contributing to this change process, and particularly study
the role of the social networks herein. The project will use
experiences from already existing tools, like the Timeline
Follow Back, Lifetime Drinking History, the Cognitive Lifetime
Drinking History, and the Adult Life Phase History that have
been developed to study drinking retrospectively, in combination
with a qualitative interview methodology to investigate drinking
careers. This combination of structured and semi-structured
instruments will secure the most accurate and reliable data
from the respondents. It is expected that the project will
generate new knowledge that will shed more light on the relationship
between individual drinking behavior and social networks,
e.g., the direction of the relationship, that is, do social
networks influence individual drinking behavior, or do drinkers
actively choose social networks that share the same values
and/or drinking habits as themselves? Furthermore, it is expected
that the project will generate information on the complicated
inter-relatedness between life events, social networks, and
individual drinking behavior. This information will be valuable
in developing new individually-based preventive measures.
Knowing about the impact of the networks will enable us to
develop programs that will incorporate the immediate social
networks of people at risk for developing alcohol problems
in the preventive work. Also, this information will provide
an expanded basis for the treatment of alcohol problems. By
providing information on the specifics about the role of social
networks, this complicated relation can be drawn into treatment
programs, and the influence of the environment can be targeted
directly.
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