Does religious attendance or participation affect the rates of alcohol use among African-Americans and Hispanics in Texas?

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go out to all who have helped me complete this study and with whom this project may have not been possible. In particular, my gratitude goes out to friends, facilitator and family for extensive and helpful comments on early drafts. I am also deeply indebted to the authors who have shared my interest and preceded me. Their works provided me with a host of information to learn from and build upon, also served as examples to emulate.

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DECLARATION

I, (Your name), would like to declare that all contents included in this thesis/dissertation stand for my individual work without any aid, & this thesis/dissertation has not been submitted for any examination at academic as well as professional level previously. It is also representing my very own views & not essentially which are associated with university.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSii

DECLARATIONiii

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW1

Usage of alcohol1

Life stage development2

African American and Hispanics in Texas3

Religion and alcohol usage4

Belief system5

Theoretical model6

African American and Hispanic history in the country7

Recent theory8

Religious Support in African Americans and Hispanics9

The African American and Hispanic Church History and development10

REFERENCES12

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

Usage of alcohol

Drinking alcohol serves as a means for laying claims to adulthood for African American and Hispanics living through a life stage rife with conflict. African American and Hispanics are expected to demonstrate a certain level of independence and responsibility (Moore 2008). Anthropologists have argued that the extended period known as adolescence provides a formative backdrop for contested identities, where individuals seek to lay claims to the honorific and evasive status known as adulthood (Lewis 2008).

Because of the contested nature of how and where rites of passages occur in a post-modern context, specifically in regards drinking alcohol, this subject matter warrants further inquiry. Drinking alcohol has been shown to serve as one of the rites of passage that young males engage in cross-culturally and historically to lay claims to manhood (Leigh 2009). Rites of passage involve three fundamental stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. When African American and Hispanics drink alcohol for the first, oftentimes under-age, they often drink surreptitiously, outside the gaze of restrictive authority figures (Grube 2009).

African American and Hispanics and young adult males used alcohol to demonstrate toughness/stamina as they attempted to hold their liquor. In this respect, drinking alcohol served the same purpose for African American and Hispanic drinkers as sparring did for novice boxers (Gentry 2008). Thus, being knocked down by alcohol is a very apt metaphor because like the boxer one is demonstrating manhood through toughness. By learning how to hold one's liquor through figuratively and literally taking its (alcohol's) best “shots”. African American and Hispanics in the current study chose to attribute their acquired skill of drinking alcohol to descriptive phrasings that connoted rituals of adversity or rites of passage into manhood. They did this because manhood rested in the embodiment of knowledge which was manifested through one's comportment, such as being able to hold ...