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01-06-2018 | Original Article

Understanding Drinking Game Behaviors: A Consideration of Alcohol Expectancies and Motives to Play and Drink

Authors: Byron L. Zamboanga, Minyu Zhang, Janine V. Olthuis, Su Yeong Kim

Published in: Cognitive Therapy and Research | Issue 3/2018

Abstract

Drinking motives have been theorized as “the final common pathway” to alcohol use, and have been found to be associated with certain drinking patterns and related outcomes. Given the importance of the context in which people drink, researchers have also begun to pay close attention to motives that are specific to participation in a drinking game. The present study builds on this burgeoning body of work by testing how sociability and liquid courage alcohol outcome expectancies and valuations are indirectly associated with drinking game behaviors by way of drinking game motives. Participants consisted of 686 students from eight U.S. colleges/universities (ages 18–23, mean age = 19.45; 73.8% female; 68.2% white) who completed a self-report questionnaire which asked about drinking game behaviors and motives for playing, alcohol outcome expectancies and valuations, general drinking motives, and typical alcohol use. Controlling for demographics, general drinking motives, and typical alcohol use, results indicated that liquid courage (alcohol outcome expectancies) and sociability (alcohol outcome expectancies and valuations) were indirectly associated with drinking game behaviors by way of enhancement/thrills and social lubrication motives for playing drinking games, respectively. Findings suggest that motives specific to playing drinking games operate similarly to general drinking motives as the “final common pathway” to drinking game behaviors. Implications for motivation-matched and expectancy challenge strategies aimed at reducing drinking games participation on college campuses are discussed.

Although the present study used the same college student sample reported in the validation sample in the Zamboanga et al. (2017) study, this study differs in that we (a) controlled for nesting of participants across college sites and general drinking motives, and (b) treated our outcome variables in the models as ordinal categorical data and used the default weighted least squares means and variance adjusted (WLSMV) estimator for modeling such data.

In the original motives for playing drinking games measure, Johnson and Sheets (2004) named this motive “sexual manipulation”; however, Zamboanga et al. (2017) renamed it “sexual pursuit” to adequately reflect the items on this subscale.

Exactly how specific motives for playing DGs are associated with DG behaviors above and beyond general drinking motives is not well understood. As such, we also conducted a path analysis model (controlling for age, gender, typical alcohol use, and general drinking motives: conformity, social, enhancement, and coping) to test the direct associations between these variables, χ² (1, N = 686) = 0.290, p = .591; RMSEA = 0.000 [90% CI 0.000, 0.082]; CFI = 1.000. Results indicated that the DG motive of enhancement/thrills was positively associated with both frequency of playing DGs (β = 0.095, p = .001) and the amount of alcohol consumed when playing DGs (β = 0.370, p < .001). Similarly, competition motives were positively related to frequency of playing DGs (β = 0.125, p = .003).

At the bivariate level, age was also negatively associated with the drinking game motive of enhancement/thrills and the AOE for sociability and liquid courage.

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Title: Understanding Drinking Game Behaviors: A Consideration of Alcohol Expectancies and Motives to Play and Drink
Authors: Byron L. Zamboanga
Minyu Zhang
Janine V. Olthuis
Su Yeong Kim
Publication date: 01-06-2018
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Cognitive Therapy and Research / Issue 3/2018
Print ISSN: 0147-5916
Electronic ISSN: 1573-2819
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9886-1

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Understanding Drinking Game Behaviors: A Consideration of Alcohol Expectancies and Motives to Play and Drink

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