Professor of Psychology Old Dominion University Norfolk, Virginia
Hazardous drinking is a prevalent risky behavior among emerging adults. Drinking motives, or the reasons that individuals drink, are important and proximal precipitating factors of drinking outcomes. Although drinking motives are associated with different levels of drinking risk, much of our knowledge on drinking motivations among emerging adults has been focused on college students. While findings have been mixed, there is evidence to suggest differences in endorsement of drinking motives between students and nonstudents. It remains unclear, however, whether nonstudents are at increased risk of hazardous drinking from these apparent differences in drinking motives. As such, the current study aimed to examine differences in drinking motives among heavy and non-heavy drinking students and nonstudents. Such information would broaden the scope of our understanding of drinking motivations that is more inclusive of most emerging adults. Participants were 623 drinkers between ages 18-25 years (31.1% women; 69.0% White; Mage = 21.46) who were recruited online. Path analysis via Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017) was used to test the associations between three predictors (i.e., student status, heavy drinking status, and their interaction) and four drinking motive outcomes (i.e., conformity, coping, enhancement, social). For all motives, student status and drinker status interacted to predict endorsement of that motive. Regardless of the drinking motive tested, nonstudents showed stronger associations with being a heavy drinker than college students while controlling for drinking quantity. Specifically, coping (β = 0.77) and enhancement (β = 1.24) motives were associated with being a heavy drinker for nonstudents only. Social motives were significantly associated with being a heavy drinker for both groups of emerging adults, but this association was stronger for nonstudents (β = 2.01). Conformity motives were significantly associated with being a non-heavy drinker for college students, and no such association existed for nonstudents. Findings suggest that nonstudents represent a subpopulation of emerging adults whose drinking motives are especially related to their status as a hazardous drinker. Thus, drinking interventions focused on changing one’s drinking motives, such as increasing adaptive coping skills to reduce drinking to cope, may be more potent in reducing hazardous drinking for nonstudents than college students. As a future direction, a better understanding of the demographic and psychosocial factors that make nonstudents unique in their drinking motivations could enhance intervention efforts tailored specifically for nonstudents drinkers. Furthermore, given the varying association strengths observed, this area of research would benefit from explorations into the underlying mechanisms accounting for the educational disparities that emerged. Such mechanisms may serve as targets for interventionists to indirectly weaken the associations between drinking motives and hazardous drinking.
