Protective Role of Spirituality in Alcohol and HIV Risk

饮酒在青少年中很普遍。到14岁时，超过一半的中学生至少偶尔饮酒。此外，青少年是酗酒的主要高危人群之一，估计有30%的青春期男孩和15%的青春期女孩在18岁之前达到酗酒的标准(一次饮酒超过或等于5杯)。开始饮酒与青少年的各种负面后果有关，包括更高的酒精依赖风险、严重的健康问题，包括自杀和与酒精有关的交通事故。虽然其他青少年的酗酒率有所下降，但非裔美国青年的酗酒率在过去10年里一直居高不下(男孩15%，女孩5%)。频繁的酗酒使非洲裔美国青年面临与饮酒有关的问题的高风险。事实上，饮酒的非裔美国青少年由于饮酒而经历的负面后果不成比例地更多，尽管他们的饮酒水平与其他族裔的年轻人相当，甚至更低。由于与青少年酗酒有关的问题的严重性，研究人员已经开始探索保护因素，这些因素可能会预防高危青少年形成问题饮酒模式。其中几项调查考察了宗教信仰和灵性信仰可能起到的潜在保护作用。对全球宗教信仰和灵性的较高评价似乎确实是防止青少年饮酒问题的保护因素。然而，最近的证据表明，在成年人中，一个人相信上帝直接控制他或她的酒精使用的程度，作为防止问题饮酒的一个保护因素，可能具有特殊的重要性。这一新的证据表明，有必要研究与酒精相关的上帝/更高权力控制信仰在青少年中的保护作用，但目前还没有发表的研究。这方面研究的缺乏至少部分是由于缺乏针对特定领域的上帝/更高权力控制信仰的现有措施，供非裔美国青年使用；2)探讨与酒精有关的上帝/更高权力控制信仰在非裔美国青年饮酒问题发展中的保护作用。

Drinking among adolescents is prevalent. By the age of 14, over half all secondary school students drink at least occasionally. Further, adolescents are one of the major at-risk populations for alcohol abuse, with an estimated 30% of adolescent boys and 15% of adolescent girls meeting the criteria for heavy drinking (consuming greater than or equal to 5 drinks at a time) by the age of 18. The initiation of drinking is associated with a variety of negative outcomes for teens including higher risk of alcohol dependence, serious health problems including suicide and alcohol-related traffic accidents. While rates of heavy drinking among other adolescents have declined, rates among African-American youth have stayed consistently high (15% for boys and 5% for girls) over a 10-year period. Frequent heavy drinking places African-American youth at high risk for the development of problems related to their alcohol use. In fact, African- American adolescents who drink experience disproportionately more negative consequences as a result of alcohol use even though their levels of use are comparable or even lower than youth of other ethnic groups. Due to the severity of the problems associated with adolescent alcohol misuse, researchers have begun to explore protective factors that may inoculate at-risk adolescents from developing problem drinking patterns. Several of those inquiries have examined the potential protective role that religiosity and spirituality might play. Higher ratings of global religiosity and spirituality do indeed appear to be protective factors against problem drinking in adolescents. However, in adults recent evidence suggests that the extent of an individual's belief that God directly controls his or her alcohol use may have particular importance as a protective factor against problem drinking. This new evidence suggests a need for research on the protective role of alcohol- related God/Higher Power control beliefs in adolescents, however no published studies exist. The dearth of studies in this area is due at least in part to the paucity of available measures of domain-specific God/Higher Power control beliefs for use with African-American youth, 2) to explore the protective role of alcohol-related God/Higher Power control beliefs in the development of problem drinking among African-American youth.