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In the Aztec culture of pre-Columbian Mexico the rules for the use of alcoholic beverages were clearly defined and strictly enforced. Drinking was permitted only on religious occasions and the amount drunk was restricted.
A comparison of abstainers and alcoholics showed that the latter were more often involved in social conflicts and breaches of social norms. The breaches of social values were as important as the drinking in society's definition of an alcoholic.
Most job-based alcoholism policies and programs incorporate a strategy of constructive confrontation. Data from two national samples of over 600 managers in a large corporation were collected to assess the effectiveness of this strategy with both problem drinkers and other problem employees. Results showed that supervisors of problem drinkers took more actions than did supervisors of employees with other problems. Work performance of problem-drinking employees improved more than that of other problem employees. Oral discussions containing both constructive and confrontational topics were positively associated with employees accepting help and with better work performance following intervention for both samples of employees. However, more severe forms of discipline--written warnings, suspensions or discharges--were negatively associated with work performance following intervention in both samples. The results suggest that (1) the strategy is most effective when repeated discussions balance both constructive and confrontational elements, and (2) the presence of the alcoholism policy encouraged supervisors to take more actions with problem drinkers, legitimated those actions and made the threat of discipline more credible.
A survey of alcohol use among 217 Black and Haitian migrant agricultural workers was conducted in 13 camps in three counties of upstate New York. The orienting hypothesis stated that older, unattached men account for much of the drinking on migrant camps and that older, unattached men have experienced a variety of personal troubles as a result of their drinking. The results of the survey were found to support the initial hypothesis. In camps composed primarily of family groups, social control mechanisms were found to be more highly developed than in camps composed primarily of unattached, isolated men. It was also found that this difference in degree of social control was reflected in differences of drinking behavior. It is suggested that the mechanization of agriculture has become a self-reinforcing process that results in a proportional increase in the use of the homeless and troubled as a source of low-cost agricultural labor.
This article combines the qualitative tradition of naturalistic observations with quantitative multivariate methods to quantify the relationships between drinker characteristics, group composition, duration of the drinking period and alcohol consumption. Employing observational data on over 6,000 drinkers collected in six on-premise licensed establishments in California, structural equation regression methods were used to estimate the simultaneous effects of duration of the drinking period and total consumption on each other, controlling for patron characteristics and group composition. Results from all six establishments indicate that consumption is higher in larger groups because of longer drinking times at the establishment and not because of any direct effect of consumption on length of the drinking period. Group composition effects on consumption are also indicated since females in mixed drinking groups tend to reduce the alcohol consumption of males, but not the group as a whole.
In a 1984 national survey of U.S. adult drinking practices and problems, social pressure to change one's drinking behavior was significantly related in men to a history of alcohol treatment or self-help (AA), as was severity of alcohol dependence. When dependence was added to a model already including social pressure as a predictor of treatment, the fit of the model to the data was significantly improved. Implications of the findings for diagnostic criteria used to define alcohol dependence are discussed, as well as the relationship of the findings to a theoretical model of illness behavior.
OBJECTIVE: This research provides estimates of how strongly family bonds, family drug use, age, educational commitment and peer drug use are associated with the frequency and amount of alcohol consumption among adolescents, and compares females and males. METHOD: Using questionnaire data from a random sample of 27,000 adolescents, structural equation modeling is used to evaluate the strength of several risk factors. RESULTS: The influence of family bonds is moderately strong but operates primarily through peers; adolescents with higher family bonds are less likely to have close friends who are involved with drugs. Family bonds have a relatively strong, positive association with educational commitment, and adolescents with a higher educational commitment tend to drink less frequently; and when they drink, they tend to consume smaller amounts. Living in a family where other family members have a problem with alcohol or other drugs increases the chance that an adolescent has friends who drink or use other drugs. CONCLUSIONS: Family bonding has small but significant direct effects and moderate indirect effects on both the frequency and amount of alcohol use. Family and peer influences are similar for both females and males. Living in a family where other family members have a drug problem increases the chance that an adolescent has friends who use drugs. Family bonding appears to be an important social control mechanism that may decrease the risk of alcohol abuse among adolescents.
OBJECTIVE: Less is known about heavier drinking in adolescents than about alcohol initiation. The present study examined the emergence of regular (weekly) and heavy episodic (five or more drinks at a time) adolescent drinking as a function of social influence (modeling and social control) from parents and peers. METHOD: A three-wave study was conducted using a representative household sample of families in metropolitan Buffalo, New York (N = 612). Over half (54%) of the adolescent respondents were female. Black families made up 30% of the sample. Interviews were conducted at 1-year intervals. Adolescent drinking was dichotomized at each wave into abstinence/light drinking versus regular drinking. Logistic regression including only adolescents who were abstainers/light drinkers at Wave 1 was performed to assess which Wave- variables could predict regular-drinking onset by Wave 2; a similar analysis examined the onset of heavy episodic drinking by Wave 2. Parallel analyses using Wave-2 variables to predict the onset of the drinking outcomes by Wave 3 were also conducted. RESULTS: Across the different analyses, the strongest psychosocial predictors of advancement to heavier drinking were friend's drinking and low parental monitoring. Also, white adolescents were at greater risk than their black counterparts. CONCLUSIONS: A multidimensional approach to prevention that addresses different processes of influence (e.g., modeling and social control) involving both parental and peer domains is likely to be most successful in deterring the onset of heavier drinking in adolescents.
OBJECTIVE: This article reports on an investigation of the relationship of social control mechanisms at work to drinking practices of 10,000 salaried and hourly employees working in the same U.S. industry, with the same union, but in two different work environments. One work environment reflected an organizational culture that is traditional to U.S. management; the other was based on a nontraditional Japanese transplant model. METHOD: The research team used a combination of methods including in-home surveys (N = 1,723; 1,378 men) and ethnography (110 semistructured interviews and 200 hours of direct observation inside the plants). Respondents were asked about general and work-related drinking, perceptions of drinking norms, strengths or weaknesses of alcohol-related policies and procedures for policy enforcement. RESULTS: Although overall consumption rates in both populations were similar, significant differences between the two samples existed regarding work-related drinking. The Traditional (i.e., U.S.) model was associated with more permissive norms regarding drinking before or during work shifts (including breaks) and higher workplace drinking rates than the Transplant (i.e., Japanese) model. Analyses revealed that alcohol policies, and the extent to which policies are actually enforced, predicted drinking norms and alcohol availability at work. Drinking norms, in turn, predicted work-related drinking and accounted for differences in alcohol consumption between the two worksites. Analyses of ethnographic data provided descriptive understandings of aspects of the two organizational cultures that disabled mechanisms for social control of drinking in one setting and enabled those mechanisms in the other. CONCLUSIONS: These understandings of how social control mechanisms predict work-related drinking practices provide guidelines for alcohol problem prevention in a specific kind of occupational environment. However, our identification of aspects of social control that successfully regulate workplace drinking is applicable to other kinds of occupational settings as well.
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OBJECTIVES: We tested whether higher levels of social capital on college campuses protected against individual risks of binge drinking. METHODS: We used a nationally representative survey of 17,592 young people enrolled at 140 4-year colleges. Social capital was operationalized as individuals' average time committed to volunteering in the past month aggregated to the campus level. RESULTS: In multivariate analyses controlling for individual volunteering, sociodemographics, and several college characteristics, individuals from campuses with higher-than-average levels of social capital had a 26% lower individual risk for binge drinking (P < .001) than their peers at other schools. CONCLUSIONS: Social capital may play an important role in preventing binge drinking in the college setting.
Differential social control theory was investigated with survey data from 860 adolescents using path analytic techniques. Peer non-use expectations, peer use, and the adolescent's own attitude each have a direct influence on drug use. Peer non-use expectations have the largest total effect on drug use and are directly influenced by parental, peer, and school attachments. Student's attitude has a direct effect on drug use, however, a majority of the association is spurious. Peers' drug use has the largest, direct influence on drug use. The likelihood of adolescents' associating with drug using friends is reduced by a close relationship with their parents and by knowing that their friends disapprove of drug use. The model explained 60 percent of the variance. Students do not use drugs if they are unwilling to jeopardize their relationship with their parents and non-using friends. They are also less likely to use drugs if they think their parents and friends disapprove of drug use and if their friends do not use drugs themselves.
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Goffman's model of institutional totality was examined within a social-exchange framework in the boarding and nursing units of two homes for the aged. The power-dependence relationships appeared to be determined by the residents' social resources -- all the assets that enabled them to reward a favor, extort a concession, or do without -- and by the conditions of patienthood that limited their use. Boarders were equally responsive to peer and staff expectations while patients, lacking a cohesive peer group, were more confirming to the demands of staff members, who controlled most of the system's rewards in the nursing units. Efforts to humanize these late-life settings seem unlikely to succeed unless they take into account staff's ability to structure the conditions of negotiation as a base of its power.
Criticism of social context does not generally appear in medical encounters. When contextual issues arise in medical discourse, messages of ideology and social control may become apparent, usually without the conscious awareness of the participants. By easing the physical or psychological impact of contextual difficulties, or by encouraging patients' conformity to mainstream expectations of desirable behavior, encounters with doctors can help win patients' consent to troubling social conditions. Seen in this light, doctor-patient encounters become micropolitical situations that do not typically encourage explicit statements or actions by health professionals to change contextual sources of their patients' difficulties. A critical theory influenced by structuralism suggests that the surface meanings of signs in medical discourse prove less important than their structural relationships. In addition, a theoretical approach adopting elements of post-structuralism and Marxist literary criticism emphasizes the marginal, absent, or excluded elements of medical discourse. Contextual features that shape a text include social class, sex, age, and race. Through the underlying structure of medical discourse, contextual problems are expressed, marginalized, and managed.
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