Personality, social environment, and past behavior as predictors of late adolescent alcohol use

Personality, as measured by subscales of the Sensation Seeking Scale (Zuckerman, 1979), social environmental exposure to alcohol use measured by parental and peer alcohol use, and past alcohol use were examined as predictors of late adolescent alcohol use in a sample of 575 1st-year college students. Efficacious predictors, in order of importance, include peer alcohol use, disinhibition, and age of first intoxication. The results support the relative importance of peer networks over parental models in determining late adolescent alcohol use. Our combinatorial model of personality, social environment, and past behavior is one such model in a growing trend toward the use of interactional models for predicting behavior.