THE IMPACT OF PEER INFLUENCE OF ALCOHOLIC CONSUMPTION IN INI LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.0 Background of Study
Peer influence is the effect the people around an individual have on his or her decisions. And though this seems simple, peer pressure can be a complicated issue with many different facets. The ability to resist peer pressure comes from a combination of many factors, including self-esteem, respect for others, and experience. There are both positive and negative peer influence. Positive peer influence helps your child make the right choices, and results from having a group of friends with positive values. Negative peer influence makes it difficult for your child to make positive choices, even if he knows the right thing to do.
Prior research (Steinberg & Monahan, 2011) describes the development of susceptibility to peer pressure in adolescence as following an inverted U-shaped curve, increasing during early adolescence, peaking around age 14, and declining thereafter. Peer influence is commonly invoked in discussions of adolescent misbehavior and is implicated in many accounts of adolescent risk taking, because most risky behavior in which adolescents engage, such as delinquency, substance use, and reckless driving, takes place in the company of peers (Simons-Morton, Lerner, & Singer, 2005). There is little doubt that peers actually influence each other and that the effects of peer influence are stronger during adolescence than in adulthood. Indeed, one recent experimental study found that exposure to peers during a risk-taking task doubled the amount of risky behavior among middle adolescents, increased it by 50% among college undergraduates, and had no impact at all among adults (Gardner & Steinberg, 2013 in Steinberg & Monahan, 2016). The ability to resist peer influence comes from a combination of many factors, including self-esteem, respect for others, and experience.
Alcohol is a product that has provided a variety of functions for people throughout all history.According to Hanson 1995, from the earliest times to the present, alcohol has played an important role in religion and worship. Historically, alcoholic beverages have served as sources of needed nutrients and have been widely used for their medicinal, antiseptic, and analgesic properties. The role of such beverages as thirst quenchers is obvious and they play an important role in enhancing the enjoyment and quality of life.