Alcohol Abuse in the United States: A Study of the Effects of low Self-Control and Social Bonds

The purpose of this study is to understand how low self-control and social bonds impact adult’s excessive consumption of alcohol in the United States. This is of great importance, especially since alcohol related issues have been of great public concern throughout history. Since the early days of prohibition, there have been many who have voiced strong opposition to the abuse of alcohol in the United States. Those opposed to alcohol abuse focus on the problems associated with it, including vandalism and sexual assault, medical disorders, marital difficulties, job loss, and automobile crashes ((Abbey, 1991; Engs and Hanson, 1988; Saltz and Elandt, 1986).

Although alcohol related issues continue to enjoy tremendous attention from researchers, not much work has been done to probe the combined effects of social control and social bonds on alcohol abuse. Most work on the subject of deviance has either focused one-sidedly on the effects of social control on deviance or on how social bonds impact deviance. Thus, how social control and social bonds combine to impact deviance, particularly alcohol abuse has largely been a matter of conjecture. For example, the general theory of crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990) holds that differences in the propensity to engage in crime and other deviance are mainly determined by individual differences in self-control. This perspective, which features self-control as the explanatory variable, contrasts sharply with Hirschi’s (1969) social bonding theory, which sees deviance as primarily a function of weak social bonds such as poor attachment to others and low involvement in conventional activities. Although reconciling these two perspectives in a study of alcohol abuse is daunting, one possibility which I intend to explore in the current study is that social bond inevitably mediates the relationship between self-control and alcohol abuse (See Longshore, Turner, and Stein 1996).

Therefore, there are several reasons why the topic of the effects of low self-control and social bonds on alcohol use is important. First, most social problems arise from a combination of factors that may only be understood when several methods are used to study them. Alcohol use certainly falls within this category. Thus, the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods gives the study methodological rigor, which clarifies and improves the validity of the study. Second, it will enable me propose a model of theory integration that offers more conceptual richness and greater predictive power than any one theory individually. Third, theory integration can help to resolve disparate conceptual approaches in sociology (Bernard and Snipes, 1996; Messner, Krohn and Liska, 1989), producing an "intellectual account" through proper identification of dominant themes, premises, hypotheses, and findings common across different disciplines or causal propositions (Tittle 2000). Finally, I believe that as suggested by Longshore et al. (1996), the self-control and social bonding perspectives can be combined into one explanatory model in which social bonds are treated as processes through which low self-control exerts some or all of its influences on alcohol abuse. Thus, the value we can gain from understanding how self-control and social bonding combine to impact alcohol use among adults in the United States cannot be overstated.