Research & Resources

Depression and Alcohol Use in American Indian Adolescents

Researchers in this study examined the roles of family warmth and parental monitoring and the association between depressive symptoms and alcohol use in a large, nationally representative sample of American Indian adolescents. Data were collected from 3,498 American Indian 7th–12th graders residing on or near a reservation during the 2009–2013 period. There was a small, but statistically significant, positive association between depressive symptoms and alcohol use. Greater depressive symptoms were associated with significantly less perceived family warmth, which was associated with significantly greater alcohol use. Family warmth significantly accounted for the association between depressive symptoms and lesser alcohol use at high levels of parental monitoring. Results of the study suggested that developing culturally sensitive prevention and treatment approaches focusing on increasing both family warmth and parental monitoring are important to address the co-occurrence of depression and alcohol misuse among American Indian adolescents.

This paper, “Depression and alcohol use in American Indian adolescents: The influence of family factors,” was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

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