Policies to Reduce Underage Drinking

Abstract

(from the chapter) Drinking behavior is influenced by many factors in the social and policy environment, such as messages in media programming, advertising, community norms, public laws, policies and practices of public and private institutions, and economic factors (Wagenaar & Perry, 1994). Even the best-designed and most effective programs to change knowledge, attitudes, perceptions, expectancies, intentions to drink, and to teach refusal skills typically have modest or temporary effects because people continue to be exposed to a multidimensional environment that encourages risky alcohol use (Holder & Edwards, 1995). Changing the environment through public and institutional policies is an important approach to achieving permanent reductions in underage drinking. Our working definition of 'policy' is: standards for behavior or practices that are formalized to some degree (i.e., written), and embodied in rules, regulations, or operating procedures. In this paper, we review the scientific literature on numerous alcohol control policies that may affect underage drinking and related problems. For each policy, we first summarize all published studies on the effectiveness of that particular policy in reducing drinking and drinking-related problems among the general population. We then provide a more detailed review of published studies that specifically address the effectiveness of the policy on reducing underage drinking and drinking-related problems (Table 1). We group policies into four categories based on the number of published studies available: extensive research (more than 100 studies); moderate research (10 to 30 studies); minimal research (fewer than 10 studies); or no research (no studies to date). We do not cover here all alcohol control measures, but rather limit this review to policies that are most likely to directly affect youth drinking and drinking related outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).