Adolescent and Young Adult Drunkenness and Future Educational Attainment and Labor Market Integration: A Population-Based Longitudinal Study

Objective: Drunkenness is common among youth and has been linked to injuries and other acute consequences as well as subsequent alcohol problems. Less is known about the long-term consequences of drunkenness regarding future education and labor market integration, and how risk changes during the developmental course. We identified trajectories of drunkenness from early adolescence to young adulthood and examined how drunkenness was associated with subsequent outcomes in the domains of education, income, unemployment, and disability. Method: We used four-wave longitudinal data from 3,116 participants (1,428 men; 1,688 women) from the population-based Young in Norway Study (ages 13 to 31). Questionnaire data on drunkenness were linked to register data on subsequent educational and occupational outcomes. Results: The frequency of drunkenness during the past 12 months increased from ages 13 to 21, followed by a levelling off and decline from age 25 to 31. Early drunkenness (at age 13) was related to lower educational attainment, lower income, and higher risk for disability and unemployment at age 32; yet, after control for covariates, most of these associations became nonsignificant. Later drunkenness (>21 years) was either not associated or inversely associated with educational and employment outcomes. Conclusions: Our results indicate that the effect of drunkenness changes during the developmental course. In early teenage years, drunkenness seems to be a marker of risk and is linked to poor educational outcomes and weak labor market integration. From the early twenties, drunkenness instead seems to be related to positive educational and work-related outcomes.