Critique of Article about Alcohol Consumption of Adolesents - Essay Example

First of all, generalizing the results of this research for adolescents of high socioeconomic status is inappropriate when the data was collected only from secondary school students. The results do not pertain to non-school-going adolescents of high socioeconomic status. Changing the title from “Are adolescents with…” to “Are adolescent students with…” would make it more suitable for this research. The research has more studied the college-related factors that affect an early adult’s tendency to consume alcohol and illicit drugs than the socioeconomic factors. In order to do justice to the word “socioeconomic”, it is imperative that adolescent children of parents who are both highly educated and earn high income are included in the study.

This research studied the correlations between the high education of parents and the tendency of adolescents to involve in binge drinking, and consumption of drugs like marijuana and cocaine, and the high income of parents and the adolescents’ consumption of alcohol and illicit drug use, neither of which can be necessarily considered as adolescents of high socioeconomic status. In addition to that, there is no objective reason to consider the adolescents included in the research as belonging to high socioeconomic status.

Basically, the researchers studied the adolescent children of parents with supposedly high socioeconomic status, and not exactly the adolescents with high socioeconomic status. This justifies the change of the title from “Are adolescents with high socioeconomic status…” to “Are adolescents with the high socioeconomic status of the parents…”.A study of the tendency of adolescents with high socioeconomic status to consume alcohol and illicit drugs in early adulthood does not make much sense as the socioeconomic status is likely to change over the course of time.

It would probably have been more appropriate to study the tendency of early adults with high socioeconomic status to consume alcohol and illicit drugs. The authors state that the third wave of study was conducted from 2001 to 2002 on the same adolescents that had been collected data from in the years 1994 to 1995 and that the age of the research participants in the third wave of study ranged from 18 to 27 (Humensky, 2010, p. 2). This is a very broad group of participants in terms of age, and the extent to which the individual participants were in their early adulthood varied from one participant to another.

No objective and referenced definition of early adulthood has been provided in the research, which creates subjectivity about the justification of the inclusion of participants from such a broad age range in the study. Last but not least, the causality in this research is hard to establish with utmost surety owing to the fact that the AddHealth which was fundamentally referred to for the data was essentially an observational study rather than a randomized control trial.