For White drinkers, higher religious social control reduced associations of first-degree FH with high-risk drinking, similar to other work using individual-level religious practices to measure social control (Button et al., 2010, Koopmans et al., 1999, Chartier et al., 2016). It was unexpected that these interactive effects did not emerge for women or for Blacks and Hispanics, given prior studies suggesting that religious social controls on drinking may be stronger for these demographic groups (Michalak et al., 2007). However, area-level religious effects were assessed when accounting for religious rules against drinking at the individual level, which was consistently associated with a lower likelihood of high-risk drinking across all sex and race/ethnicity subgroups. In post-hoc analyses, we tested whether individual-level religious prohibition on drinking moderated the associations of FH with the drinking outcomes, but there were no significant interactions in any of the three racial/ethnic subgroups for either outcome (all p > .10; detailed results available upon request). Further work to assess how individual- and area-level religion interact with each other, and with FH, in relation to adult drinkers’ alcohol consumption patterns and problems would be informative.
