Television
Adolescents are heavy users of television. Extrapolating from recent data obtained from a nationally representative survey, 11- to 13-year-olds watch 27.7 hours and 14- to 18-year-olds watch 20.2 hours of broadcast and taped television programming each week (Roberts, Foehr, Rideout, and Brodie, 1999a). As a result, they are immersed in drinking portrayals and alcohol product placements. A recent content analysis of primetime television from the 1998-1999 season, for example, indicates that 71 percent of all programming depicted alcohol use and 77 percent contained some reference to alcohol (Christensen, Henriksen, and Roberts, 2000). Among those programs most popular with teenagers, 53 percent portrayed alcohol use; 84 percent of TV-14-rated programming, 77 percent of TV-PG programming, and 38 percent of TV-G programming depicted alcohol use. More episodes portrayed drinking as an overall positive experience (40 percent) rather than a negative one (10 percent), although negative consequences were mentioned or portrayed in 23 percent of episodes. Underage drinking was relatively rare. Only 2 percent of regular characters under the age of 18 were depicted drinking alcohol. In another recent content analysis, however, characters between the ages of 13 to 18 were found to account for 7 percent of all alcohol incidents portrayed (Mathios, Avery, Bisogni, and Shanahan, 1998). When it occurs, youthful drinking or expressed desire to drink is often presented as a means of appearing to be adult and grownup (Grube, 1995). Other research suggests that drinkers tend to be regular characters, of high socioeconomic status, attractive, and glamorous (Mathios et al., 1998; Wallack, Grube, Madden, and Breed, 1990), although youthful drinkers are depicted in a less favorable light than older drinkers. Drinking is often treated as humorous and is associated with valued outcomes such as camaraderie (Hundley, 1995). Although common when considered at the program level, the prevalence of drinking characters is considerably below that for the U.S. population. Thus, in a recent analysis of primetime programming, only 11 percent of characters over the age of 34 were drinkers compared with 52 percent of similarly aged adults in the U.S. population (Long, O’Connor, Gerbner, and Concato, 2002). Only 14 percent of characters between ages 18 and 34 drank and only 2 percent of those under 18 drank, compared with 61 percent and 19 percent, respectively, for the U.S. population in these age groups.
Little research has addressed the potential effects of exposure to drinking on television on young people’s drinking beliefs and behaviors. Generally speaking, correlational studies have found small, but statistically significant, relations between television viewing and alcohol-related beliefs and behaviors. Thus, Tucker (1985) found that high school boys who were heavier television viewers drank more than lighter viewers. Similarly, Neuendorf (1985) reported that television viewing was related to beliefs about drinking among 10- to 14-year-old adolescents: Heavier viewers were more likely than lighter viewers to agree that people who drink are happy and you have to drink to have fun at a sporting event.
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More recently, in a prospective study of 1,533 ninth-grade students, it was found that television viewing was related to initiation of drinking over an 18-month period (Robinson, Chen, and Killen, 1998). Specifically, each 1-hour increase in television viewing at baseline was associated with a 9 percent increased risk of initiating drinking during the following 18 months (OR = 1.09), after controlling for age, gender, and other media use. Unexpectedly, however, each hour of watching taped programming and movies on video was associated with an 11 percent average decrease in drinking initiation. Moreover, drinkers and nondrinkers did not differ in weekly hours of television viewing at baseline, and television viewing was not associated with increases in consumption among those young people who were already drinkers at baseline. A final study investigated reported television viewing and scores on a risky behavior scale that included drinking for a sample of 14-to 16-year-old adolescents (Klein et al., 1993). Although significant positive relations were found between viewing and involvement in risky behaviors for specific genres (e.g., cartoons), the results were inconsistent across genres and no effect was found for overall TV viewing. Moreover, data relating specifically to drinking were not presented.
These correlational studies suffer from potentially serious conceptual and methodological problems. Conceptually, none of the studies directly measured exposure to televised drinking portrayals. Rather, they relied only on measures of overall television viewing. The problem with such measures is that children watching equal amounts of television may be differentially exposed to alcohol portrayals depending on their program preferences and attention levels. More importantly, all of these studies used correlational analyses that cannot provide evidence for the direction of the relationship between television viewing and drinking beliefs and behaviors. Some unconsidered third variable may influence both viewing and drinking. This interpretation cannot be entirely discounted, even for the single longitudinal study.
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In addition to the correlational studies, the influence of televised portrayals of drinking on young people has been addressed in experimental studies (Kotch, Coulter, and Lipsitz, 1986; Rychtarik, Fairbank, Allen, Foy, and Drabman, 1983). In both of these studies, children who were shown videotaped segments from popular television series containing drinking scenes expressed more favorable attitudes and beliefs about drinking than did children exposed to similar segments without drinking.
Although these studies are suggestive, they are problematic. First, the effects were small and selective. In one case (Kotch et al., 1986) significant effects were found for boys but not girls, and then only for a few of the measures of alcohol beliefs that were obtained. Second, the possibility exists that the children may have perceived the drinking in the video as representing the experimenter’s expectations regarding their task in the experimental situation. Thus, they may have been responding to what they believed the experimenter wanted them to do, rather than the actual drinking scenes. Third, the experimental situation in both cases is highly artificial, making it difficult to generalize the results to the real world. Self-selection, differential attention, and other factors that operate in the natural viewing situation are not present. A major concern is the fact that exposure to the drinking portrayals in these studies is brief. The experimental situation simply cannot provide a parallel to the real world where exposure occurs more or less regularly over relatively long periods of time. It is likely that the cumulative effects of such long-term exposure are far more important than any effects of short-term exposure.
In sum, the available evidence regarding the influence of televised alcohol portrayals on young people is inconclusive, at best. Further research using more sophisticated research designs and analytic techniques will be necessary to provide a more definitive answer to this question.
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