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Introduction: Any attempt to describe and comprehend alcohol use and abuse amongadolescents starts with a reliable measure that reflects accurately adolescents drinkingpatterns. One of the biggest challenges researchers in this area have faced is relatedto the procedures that led to a valid and consistent measure of drinking behaviors.In this context, latent class analyses (LCA) offers the possibility to resolve some ofthese difficulties. LCA is a statistical tool that has been used in the literature to findgroups among the data. Specifically, LCA allows to reduce the whole set of datathrough obtaining information regarding how multiple observed measures are related,and which behavior is underneath these relationships. This method starts with theassumption that co variation among a particular set of manifest variables is attributableto the association these variables exhibit with a latent variable, for instance, drinkingpattern of alcohol use. Then, the goal is to find groups of people that show similarcharacteristics along the set of manifest variables used in the model. This methodimproves the traditional ones because LCA tolerates the simultaneously use of alarger number of variables than the typical questions regarding frequency and quantityof alcohol use. In this context, the present work was conducted in order to identifydifferent drinking patterns among Argentinean adolescents. Method: Participants were264 adolescents from 13 to 18-years old (56.1% female). Latent class analysis wasperformed with data from 217 (57.6% female) actual drinkers. The following set ofobservable variables, frequency of alcohol use, number of standard drinks, frequencyof drinking until drunk, and probability of alcohol intake during the next week was usedto recognize the patterns of alcohol use. Fit of the different models was evaluatedthrough recommended indices (BIC, AIC, and AIC3). Results: According to the mentioncriteria, the three-class model was selected, and each of the three outcome classeswas labeled as follow: social drinkers, binge drinkers, and heavy drinkers. Eachcategory differs from the others as a function of the probability for various responseson each observed variable. A fourth class corresponding to those who reported theydidnt drink alcohol (47 participants) was added and labeled abstainers. Then, analysesof variance (ANOVA) was performed with the purpose of investigate differencesconcerning age and peer alcohol use among the latent classes. These results showedthose adolescents who belonged to the social drinking category were younger andalso, they reported to have fewer female and male friends that drink alcohol than thoseadolescents who were binge and heavy drinkers. Discussion: This procedure permitsnot only to achieve insight of the shared characteristics adolescents within a particulardrinking pattern have, but also to characterize their drinking patterns in a moreaccurate way. Indeed, one of the most valuable characteristics of this type of analysesis the possibility of considering together a larger number of indices than the classicalquantity and frequency questions, which allow to get a more complete and preciseclassification of drinking behaviors.