The Protective Influence of Parental Monitoring and Ideological Religiosity on Adolescents’ Hazardous Alcohol Use

Prior research documents a protective role for parental monitoring and religiosity against adolescents’ hazardous alcohol use, whereas impulsivity tends to function as a risk factor. Alcohol outcome expectancies and valuations may help explain the ways risk and protective factors are associated with adolescents’ hazardous drinking. We therefore tested a conditional indirect effects model of the association between parental monitoring and hazardous drinking, with expectancies and valuations as mediating variables, and ideological religiosity, impulsivity, and valuations as moderating variables.

Our cross-sectional sample, for whom we had complete self-report data on our study variables, consisted of adolescents from the northeastern United States (N = 467; M_age = 15.81, 53.5% female; 77.1% White; 59.5% religiously unaffiliated).

Lower parental monitoring corresponded to greater positive expectancies among Religious adolescents relative to Atheistic adolescents, which in turn corresponded to greater hazardous use when impulsivity and positive valuations were higher (B = −1.09, [−1.91, −0.39]). Greater parental monitoring corresponded to lower hazardous use among Spiritual relative to Atheistic (B = −1.60, p = 0.004) and Unsure (B = 1.84, p = 0.04) adolescents. Last, self-identification as Atheistic (B = 11.28, p = 0.02) or Agnostic (B = −13.08, p = 0.02) predicted lower hazardous drinking, in comparisons with Spiritual adolescents.

Our findings highlight the importance of including ideological religiosity when predicting adolescents’ alcohol use, as a means to distinguish between the constructs of religiosity and spirituality, and discern protective effects for religiosity relative to Atheistic and Agnostic comparison groups.