Factors Associated with Youth Alcohol Consumption: A Review from a Psychosocial and Ecological Perspective

Abusive alcohol consumption in adolescence is currently an important problem of public health, to the point that prevention has become a priority in health policies. Also, in the field of social intervention, the psychosocial factors involved in that consumption has been studied in the last years. In the present work a revision of those factors is carried out from the ecological perspective, in which psychological, relational and sociocultural variables are integrated. Alcohol consumption is analyzed as part of the youth culture, rejecting explanations of pathological or moralistic content, and following an approach in which alcohol consumption is understood as a mean used by the adolescent in order to achieve adjustment in a society characterized by complexity. First, individual dispositional variables are analysed; following this, variables from the family context are examined, and finally the relationship between alcohol consumption and factors of the sociocultural context are explored.