Original Research Article
Year: 2018 | Month: August | Volume: 5 | Issue: 8 | Pages: 140-148
Determinants of Alcohol Consumption of Adolescents in Western Province of Sri Lanka
Amarakoon AANR, Konarasinghe KMUB, Konarasinghe WGS
Institute of Mathematics and Management, Ranala, Sri Lanka
ABSTRACT
Adolescents are the future of a country, a critical link between childhood and adulthood, characterized by significant physical, psychological and social transitions. Alcohol is mainly shown in positive attitudes on advertisements, movies, socially, etc. Literature revealed there are three factors on adolescents consuming alcohol which were movies, gender and peers. The objective of this study is to check whether there exist any association between movies, demographic and socio factors of adolescents consuming alcohol. A sample of 101 randomly selected adolescents of public and private schools of Western Province of Sri Lanka. A self-administrated questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaire confirmed the reliability and validity. Both descriptive and inferential statistics used for data analysis. The Z-test and t-test test was used for hypothesis testing. The descriptive statistics indicated that, over 39% of adolescents have consumed alcohol, 25.7% of them consume alcohol because of friends and 5.9% of adolescents consume alcohol weekly. Inferential statistics were obtained for proportion of adolescents who consumed alcohol. The results show that the proportion of males and females consuming alcohol are equal, and proportion alcohol consumption in public schools and private schools are also identical. In conclusion, the main influence for adolescents consuming alcohol is friends. And no association was found on movies and alcohol consumption. Furthermore, there is no significant association between; gender, type of school and consumption of alcohol. Results of this study can be used for policy and strategy development to prevent alcohol consumption of adolescents.
Key words: Adolescents, Alcohol, Z-test, t-test
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