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Uni-dimensional measures of alcohol consumption may be unable to fully capture the complexity of adolescent drinking and experience of alcohol-related harms. Latent class analysis provides an empirical method to understand different adolescent drinking patterns.

Latent class analysis was used to create typologies of drinking among the 5018 current drinkers in the national Youth ‘07 survey. Determinants of drinking patterns were identified using multinomial logistic regression.

Four latent classes were identified, demonstrating an overall increase in risk of alcohol-related outcomes from increasing consumption. One class strongly deviated from this pattern, having moderate consumption patterns but disproportionately high levels of alcohol-related problems. Multinomial logistic regression found that the strongest predictors of belonging to high-risk drinking typologies were having a …