A significant body of research has focused on formative social influences on early alcohol use, and parents have an established impact [5]. Consistent with Social Learning Theory [6], disapproval of drinking, effective parental support, and monitoring reduce the likelihood of engagement with peers who drink alcohol, thereby reducing the risk of adolescent alcohol use [4, 7, 8]. Consistent with Social Control Theory [9, 10], family relationship quality is associated with alcohol use cross-sectionally [11–14] and longitudinally [15–17]. There is cross-sectional evidence that family relationship quality is more closely related to girls’ alcohol use than boys’ alcohol use [14, 18, 19] but there is little research on the extent to which these gender differences hold longitudinally. Available longitudinal research investigating these gender differences in associations has relied on contemporaneous measures of family emotional climate and alcohol use rather than lag associations between these two variables [20]. The problem with this is that significant correlations between family emotional climate and alcohol use can be bi-directionally interpreted and therefore proposed unidirectional effects may be overestimated. By lagging family variables, unidirectional effects can be gauged, enabling stronger statements about the influence of the family on alcohol use.
