Participants also reported whether, during each of the above age ranges, none, a few, some, most, or all of their peers drank alcohol, got drunk, or had problems with alcohol (e.g., had accidents, got hangovers, etc.). As the peers themselves did not report these behaviors, they are strictly perceived peer alcohol use. Peers were defined as “people you would have seen regularly and spent time with.” These data were subjected to a factor analysis to construct a single score meant to capture the extent to which an individual was exposed to peers’ alcohol use behaviors. These factor scores were used in all subsequent analyses, and will be referred to as PEER1-PEER4.
