Alone and at home: US drinkers drank more often during the first year of the pandemic

In an article out this month in Social Science & Medicine, authors Patrick et al. note that large-scale stressful events like the COVID-19 pandemic are often accompanied by changes in drinking habits. The current PIs of the long-running study, Monitoring the Future (MTF), Patrick et al. used MTF panel data collected from 2015 to 2020 “to model historical trends and potential 2020 shifts” in drinking behavior. They focused on the amount of drinking taking place by young-adults (age 19-30) and middle-adults (age 35-55) in the US, as well as the reasons and context for their drinking, and whether those differed by age and college status. Carefully adjusting their models in order to avoid attributing behaviors to the pandemic that were merely part of often-fluctuating historical trends in alcohol use, Patrick et al. found evidence to support both pandemic-related increases and reductions in alcohol use in 2020. For instance, among US young adults and middle adults, there was a decrease in the prevalence of alcohol use, but an increase in the frequency of its use. As for the reasons and context for drinking, alcohol was used increasingly for tension and boredom relief. According to the authors, “These shifts were likely due, in part, to drinking while alone and at home—which increased during the pandemic.”

Since 1975, the MTF project annually has collected cross-sectional data about substance use and other topics from nationally representative samples of high school students. The MTF project also includes a longitudinal panel study component gathered from a senior year cohort, with follow-up data until age 60. The data used in this article are available in 37072: Monitoring the Future: Restricted-Use Panel Data, United States, 1976-2019, which was updated this past March to include new data through 2019 (the previous release included data through 2017), as well as an additional data file for follow-up respondents who provided data at ages 35-60. More publications using the panel data are collected here. In addition to the panel data, both the public-use and restricted-use cross-sectional MTF data are distributed by the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program.