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R-rated Movie Viewing, Growth in Sensation Seeking and Alcohol Initiation: Reciprocal and Moderation Effects

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Abstract

The current study employed parallel process and discrete time hazard regressions to examine the interplay among exposure to R-rated movies, sensation seeking, and initiation of alcohol use in a national U.S. sample (N = 6255) of adolescents, ages 10–14, who were followed over four waves spanning 2 years. There was a short-term reciprocal relation between watching R-rated movies and sensation seeking, but over the 2-year observation period, exposure to R-rated movies was associated with increases in sensation seeking and not vice versa. Sensation seeking also moderated the effect of watching R-rated movies on initiation of alcohol consumption such that exposure was associated with greater increases in initiation of alcohol use among low sensation than among high sensation seeking adolescents. The study provides empirical evidence of an environmental media effect on sensation seeking, and important new information about the relations among sensation seeking, media exposure, and adolescent alcohol use.

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Notes

  1. The time-fixed predictors of age and gender were strongly related to initial status of both constructs (girls and younger teens were lower on both) but gender did not relate to either slope. Younger teens had higher slopes for R-rated movies than older teens. All three non-white ethnic groups were higher initially on R-rated movies than whites but for initial status of sensation seeking ethnic differences were minimal with Hispanics slightly lower than whites. For the R-rated movie slope, African American teens were lower and Hispanic teens were higher. There were no ethnic differences for the sensation seeking slope. These racial differences are replications of other analyses on this dataset (Gibbons et al., manuscript under review).

  2. Readers are probably familiar with a standard mortality hazard or survival model typically used in assessing the effect of risk factors on mortality. The standard (Cox) survival model assumes the time when the event occurred is known. For mortality, this information is obtained from the death certificate. In repeated measures survey work, one only knows that the event occurred sometime during the interval period, and that is the assumption behind a discrete-time hazard model.

  3. Mean-centered coefficients are scaled so that the mean = 0. In the context of an interaction, the hazard ratio for each variable is the effect of that variable on alcohol use for the typical adolescent; i.e., one who scored at the mean.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Mike Stoolmiller

  2. Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, USA

    Meg Gerrard, James D. Sargent & Keilah A. Worth

  3. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Frederick X. Gibbons

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  1. Mike Stoolmiller
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  2. Meg Gerrard
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  3. James D. Sargent
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  5. Frederick X. Gibbons
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Correspondence to James D. Sargent.

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Stoolmiller, M., Gerrard, M., Sargent, J.D. et al. R-rated Movie Viewing, Growth in Sensation Seeking and Alcohol Initiation: Reciprocal and Moderation Effects. Prev Sci 11, 1–13 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-009-0143-z

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