Ms Eimear Murphy:

We undertook a cross-sectional survey. The topics included in this questionnaire were alcohol use, self-reported height and weight, smoking status and mental health and well-being questions, all of which were previously validated. The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test for Consumption, AUDIT-C, which is a series three questions that indicate whether or not someone is a hazardous drinker, was employed. Parental attitude questions were taken from Research New Zealand papers and consisted of a statement with which parents disagreed or agreed or felt neutral about.

It determined what parents considered to be social norms and also what they thought about their own drinking behaviour. The questionnaire was distributed to all fifth and sixth year pupils, as well as their parents, in the Kanturk-Mallow local electorate area during the academic year 2014-15. Each parent and pupil had a corresponding number on their questionnaires in order to link their results. This gave us a sample size of 982 fifth and sixth year students in eight schools. We received a response rate of 37%, made up of 360 students and their parents. Ethical approval for the survey was granted in October from the clinical research ethics committee of the Cork teaching hospitals. The data was entered in an Excel document and transferred to IBM SPSS Statistics 20 for statistical analysis. AUDIT-C and BMI scores were calculated according to specific instrument guidelines. Analysis included descriptive analysis, frequency analysis and binary logistic regression analysis.

The mean age of adolescents was 16.89 years, the youngest being 15 years and the oldest 19 years. The mean age of parents participating in the survey was 49.69 years for fathers and 47.53 years for mothers. Notably, 87% of adolescents reported having a normal BMI, compared to 47% of parents. In addition, less than 10% of adolescents had smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime, and although 46% of the parents surveyed had smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime, the majority of these, 72.6%, were ex-smokers.

Our study focused on hazardous alcohol consumption. The AUDIT-C results showed that 34% of adolescents surveyed displayed a hazardous drinking pattern. This was reported by 39.6% of males compared to 29.9% of females. Some 47% of all parents surveyed were hazardous drinkers. This was reported by 50% of fathers and 46.8% of mothers. In regard to parental attitudes, over 90% of parents disagreed with allowing their adolescents to get drunk sometimes and rejected the idea that getting drunk is part of having fun as an adolescent. Also, more than 80% of all parents surveyed believed they set a good example for their adolescent on alcohol consumption. Notably, some 16.8% of parents said they would not be worried if their adolescent consumed four pints of alcohol once a month. Almost one fifth of parents surveyed were not concerned if another parent was to supply their adolescent with alcohol. More than 40% of parents agreed with allowing their adolescent to drink on special occasions. It is also notable that mothers were more likely to believe that their adolescent had consumed too much alcohol.