Media and Alcohol Consumption

                  Social factors are many different things that can affect or influence someone’s behavior.  These are societal level factors that can impact behavior. Aspects of society include things like healthcare, politics/laws, education and the job market. Another aspect of society that can impact your behavior is the media. When I say media I am talking about TV, billboards, songs, movies, magazines, pictures off of the Internet, music videos, and album covers.  All of these things affect our behavior even though sometimes we don’t even realize it.  Media doesn’t just influence our behaviors it can also affect or health behavior like drinking, smoking, diet, and exercise.  Media is a very big influence in people’s lives from a very young age.  Most people don’t really realize how much media impacts our behaviors. Media promotes these things and people think it’s the “cool thing to do.” The media is not a bad thing but it promotes things that could be damaging to the societies health. 

            Alcohol consumption is very often advertised in the media.  The media shows alcohol to be associated with having fun and being cool.  Since alcohol is seen in the media a good majority of the time younger audiences see it.  When alcohol is advertised it doesn’t show the possible risks, which is why it could be damaging to some peoples health. 

            Many different studies where done about the impact of alcohol use in teenagers from the exposure of the media. One certain study did thirteen different studies with 38,000 participants.  The studies where done over an eighteen year period starting in 1990 and going to 2008.  They did a review on studies over a long period of time that look at the an individuals exposer to media and their drinking behaviors at the beginning of the study and then again at the end to see if there were any changes due to the amount of media exposure they had that involved alcohol (Anderson 2009).  Their participants were teens of the age 18 years and younger or below the legal drinking age (Anderson 2009).  The conclusions of reviewing all of the studies was that the more alcohol advertising the teenagers were exposed to the more likely they were to drink, and if they already drank they were more likely to drink more then they usually did (Anderson 2009).   

            Some possible ways to lower the rate of teen drinking are to have a character some movies or TV shows chooses not to drink.  Having a character that doesn’t drink might show kids that they don’t have to drink to be cool; they can always be cool when not drinking.  Another thing that could be done would be to have commercials showing the health risks of drinking and getting behind the wheel of a vehicle after drinking. 

            If the media cut down on how much they show alcohol would it lower the teen drinking rate?

References

1. Anderson, P., De Bruijn, A., Angus, K., Gordon, R., & Hastings, G. (2009). Impact of alcohol advertising and media exposure on adolescent alcohol use: a systematic review of longitudinal studies. Alcohol and alcoholism, 44(3), 229-243.