Report Report Report 3: Alcohol merchandise

You can take your news straight, or you can take it with a generous dose of snark. Either way, the story seems clear. Here's Amy Norton, of Reuters:

Middle-schoolers who sport alcohol-branded T-shirts and caps may start to drink sooner than their peers, according to a new study.
It's uncertain whether clothes or bags with beer logos encourage some kids to start drinking. But the study results are concerning enough that parents and schools should consider keeping the merchandise out of kids' hands, said lead author Dr. Auden McClure of Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Norton gets an A for this story. Everything she writes is accurate, and although she doesn't display any skepticism about the report, she does find space to report, in a short piece, that causality has not been determined and that the study did take into account "factors such as school performance and friends' drinking habits".

What's more, skepticism about the report would not necessarily be justified, in this case. I was not predisposed to be impressed with the study, since the there was a hint of alarmism to the coverage. But in fact, after reading the study, I'm coming around to Dr McClure's point of view.

For one thing, McClure is no absolutist when it comes to underage drinking. The study was careful to exclude a glass of wine at the family dinner table, say: it looked only at drinking of which parents were unaware. If you read the study, there's no "loathing of the alcohol bogeyman," as Consumerist's Ben Popken puts it.

And although underage drinking is nowhere near as harmful as underage smoking, the study makes a pretty convincing case that alcohol merchandise encourages drinking just as it was conclusively proved in the past that tobacco merchandise encourages smoking. After all, the study controlled for " higher grade in school, male gender, exposure to peer drinking, having tried smoking, poorer academic performance, higher levels of sensation seeking and rebelliousness, and less-responsive and restrictive parenting styles." There's pretty strong evidence that there's more going on here than a simple correlation. Yes, the type of kids who drink might well be the same type of kids who express a certain amount of rebellion through wearing beer-branded clothes. But insofar as such things can be controlled for, owners of beer-branded clothes are still significantly more likely to drink than those without such merchandise.

Ultimately, the benefit of banning alcohol-branded merchandise in schools might be small, but then the cost is probably smaller still. It's very easy to forget that advertising works, because most people don't realise when they're being affected by it. But if you wouldn't allow a full-on Budweiser advertisement in a school, why would you allow a Budweiser t-shirt? It has, if anything, an even greater effect.

Posted by Felix at 12:18 EST