Alcohol and Early Marriage: Spouse and Peer Influence

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Two major data collections are planned for the next award period, Wave 5 (W5) at the seventh anniversary for the couples, and Wave 6 (W6) at the ninth anniversary. Couples who were recruitedinto the study in 1996 were assessed for W5 beginning in the Fall of 2003. W5 assessment will continue for the sample for the first 1.5 years of the next award period (April 2005 to September 2006). The W6 assessment willbegin in September 2005, and continue until September 2008. These assessments will continue to focus on drinking partnerships, marital functioning, and peer/familynetworks. In addition, couples with children between the ages of 2 and 17will provide reports on child behavior problems and parenting behavior at both of these assessments. Substantively, we will continue to focus on drinking partnerships, marital functioning, and peer/familynetworks, and our analyses will continue to examine the longitudinal relationship among these domains. In particular, we will test the implications of the relationship motivation model for understanding husband and wife drinking, and the relevance of discrepant couple drinking for marital functioning. We will also further test a stress-coping model for alcohol and marital violence, and determine whether it can be applied to other alcohol-relatedmarital problems. We will extend our analyses to address three issues of emerging importance in this sample. First, the seventh through the ninth anniversaries are critical ones with respect to marital dissolutions and we will examine the impact of recent and chronic drinking on marital dissolution controlling for other factors related to drinking and divorce. We will also test the hypothesis that couples in which both members are heavy drinkers may be less likely to divorce. A second emerging focus will be the importance of children relative to parental alcohol use. We will be examine the interrelationship between drinking, marital stress, and parenting stress, and the longitudinal impact of this on child functioning, as well as to examine whether child behavior problems influenceparental drinking and marital conflict. Finally, research indicates that many employed adults with family responsibilities report that their work and family roles interferewith one another and that this work-familyconflict is associated with adverse outcomes, including heavier or problematic drinking. In the next award period, we will be able to examine these issues longitudinally and integrate information concerning coworker drinking into models of family/work conflict and drinking.