Aboriginal social organization, contemporary experience and American Indian adolescent alcohol use.
OBJECTIVE
Anthropologists with an interest in American Indian alcohol use have long held that how native people drink has been conditioned by aspects of the social organization of their societies prior to the disruptive influences of European colonialism. Our goal in this article was to explicitly test the importance of these factors in four contemporary American Indian cultural groups.


METHODS
Using data on adolescent alcohol use drawn from the first full wave of the longitudinal Voices of Indian Teens Project (N = 1,651, 51% female), we tested whether patterns of quantity-frequency of alcohol use and the negative consequences of alcohol use predicted by social organzational variables were found among contemporary adolescents and, subsequently, whether these differences persisted when other, more proximal, variables were included.


RESULTS
Cultural differences appeared to account for a small percentage of the variance in both quantity-frequency of alcohol use and negative consequences in the initial steps of our analyses, but the pattern in these data was not consistent with the predictions of existing theories regarding aboriginal social organization. Moreover, these cultural differences were no longer significant in the final step of our analyses, suggesting that the cultural differences that did exist were better explained by other factors, at least among these adolescents.


CONCLUSIONS
Although these analyses did not indicate that culture was irrelevant in understanding adolescent alcohol use in American Indian communities, classic formulations of these effects were of limited utility in understanding the experiences of contemporary American Indian adolescents.
Spicer
Paul
P
American Indian and Alaska Native Programs, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Nighthorse Campbell Native Health Building, P.O. Box 6508, Mailstop F800, Aurora, Colorado 80045, USA. paul.spicer@uchsc.edu
Novins
Douglas K
DK
Mitchell
Christina M
CM
Beals
Janette
J
D000293:Adolescent; D000428:Alcohol Drinking / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000523:psychology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D016009:Chi-Square Distribution; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007198:Indians, North American / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D012044:Regression Analysis; D014481:United States / Q000208:ethnology