Abstract
Alcohol use and drunkenness, along with other risky behaviours, tend to emerge during the adolescent years. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and correlates of alcohol use and lifetime drunkenness among school-going adolescents in Namibia. Using the 2013 Namibia Global School-Based Student Health Survey (GSHS), 3089 adolescents aged 12–17 years (M = 15.1; SD = 1.4) responded to a cross-sectional survey that assessed substance use, psychological distress, and other health risk behaviours. Bivariate and multivariate statistical approaches were used to analyse the data. Overall, 29.8% (95% CI = 28.2–31.4%) of the total analytic sample reported past-month alcohol use, representing 34.1% (95% CI = 31.7–36.6%) among males and 26.4% (95% CI = 24.2–28.5%) among females. Similarly, the prevalence of lifetime drunkenness was 26.0% (95% CI = 24.5–27.5%), representing 33.3% (95% CI = 30.9–35.9%) among males and 20.3% (95% CI = 18.4–22.3%) in females. The final adjusted logistic models indicated that demographic characteristics (age and male gender), mental health variables (anxiety and loneliness), and lifestyle factors (cannabis use, cigarette smoking, and leisure-time sedentary behaviour) showed strong associations with increased odds of past-month alcohol use and lifetime drunkenness. Among the family-level factors, only parental supervision was found to have strong association with reduced odds of both past-month alcohol use and lifetime drunkenness. The multi-level nature of the findings underscores the need for the development of a multi-contextual and multi-sectoral intervention and prevention programmes that could target school-going adolescents who may be at risk of misusing alcohol.
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are freely available from the WHO website:https://www.who.int/teams/noncommunicable-diseases/surveillance/systems-tools/global-school-based-student-health-survey.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Namibia Ministry of Education and World Health Organization and its partners for making freely available the data from the Global School-based Student Health Survey. More importantly, we thank all the students who contributed data for this survey.
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KOA conceived, designed and organised the study. KOA and ENBQ curated and performed the statistical analysis of the data, and KOA interpreted the analysed results.. KOA drafted the manuscript; and ENBQ critiqued the manuscript for important intellectual content. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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The Institutional Review Board of the Country Office of the WHO in Namibia as well as the Ministry of Education in Namibia approved the study. Policies laid out regarding consent procedures for participation in surveys were followed including detachment of identifier information.
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Official written permissions were obtained from the Namibia Ministry of Education, the selected schools, and classroom teachers. Participating students provided written informed consent, while parental written consent was obtained from parents of participants aged 17 and younger. Finally, the study procedures were carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
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Asante, K.O., Quarshie, E.NB. The Epidemiology of Alcohol Use Among a Nationally Representative Sample of School-Going Adolescents in Namibia. Trends in Psychol. 32, 122–137 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-022-00236-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-022-00236-w