Considerable progress has been made in the last few decades towards understanding how to study adolescent peer social dynamics. These methodological advances are giving us a more confident and nuanced understanding of dynamic mechanisms that affect drinking and other forms of substance use among youth. In this paper, novel methodology has allowed us to make an initial statement about peer exposure risks for drinking onset. Our results suggest that future studies need to find ways to separate onset measures from drinking patterns once onset has occurred, as the populations at risk and the risk mechanisms themselves may be different for each.
