The social context of drinking among high school drinking drivers.

Over 2,000 high school students were surveyed with an anonymous questionnaire to determine their frequency of drunk driving, social context of alcohol consumption, beliefs about drunk driving, and quantity and frequency of alcohol consumed. About 10% of the sample was identified as drunk drivers and they were compared with non-drunk driving drinkers according to a number of measures of where and why they drank. The results revealed highly significant differences in the social context of alcohol consumption for beer, wine, and liquor consumption. Across all three beverage categories, the most important discriminating social context factors were drinking at a dormitory and drinking to get along better on dates. Beer and liquor consumption were more important than wine consumption for discriminating drunk drivers from the non-problem drinking high school population. Quantity and frequency measures of alcohol consumption along with belief measures about drinking and driving did not substantially increase the discrimination between the two groups, but significantly increased the predictive power in a multiple regression analysis including the social context of alcohol consumption items.