|
Article Excerpt
AMONG SOCIAL-COGNITIVE FACTORS, alcohol expectancies and drinking motives are often described as two equivalent determinants of alcohol use and problematic drinking among young people (for reviews, see Baer, 2002; Ham and Hope, 2003). They are different conceptually, however. "Expectancies are people's beliefs about what will happen if they (or other people) drink alcohol, whereas motives are the value placed on the particular effects they want to achieve, which motivate them to drink" (Cox and Klinger, 2004, p. 124). An individual expecting a desired effect from alcohol consumption will not necessarily drink to achieve that effect simply because the corresponding expectancy is endorsed (Cooper, 1994).
The motivational model of alcohol use assumes that each person (consciously or not) makes a decision about whether he or she will consume alcohol (Cox and Klinger, 1988, 1990). According to the model, the decision to drink is embedded in historical factors (e.g., genetic disposition); personality characteristics (e.g., extraversion, sensation seeking); sociocultural factors (e.g., drinking styles); environmental factors (e.g., alcohol availability); situational and current factors (e.g., reinforcement from recent drinking); alcohol expectancies; and drinking motives. Drinking motives are assumed to be the final path towards alcohol use--the gateway through which more distal influences (e.g., alcohol expectancies) are mediated (Catanzaro and Laurent, 2004; Cooper et al., 1995; Cronin, 1997). In terms of prevention, it is important to confirm empirically whether drinking motives are more closely related to frequent and excessive drinking than are alcohol expectancies (e.g., to identify adolescents prone to problematic drinking; Kuntsche et al., 2006a). The aim of the current study is to test whether, in adolescence, the association between particular alcohol expectancies and different alcohol-use measures is mediated by particular drinking motives.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that both alcohol expectancies and drinking motives are related to alcohol use (for reviews, see Baer, 2002; Ham and Hope, 2003; Jones et al., 2001; Kuntsche et al., 2005). Few studies, however, have empirically addressed the associations between the two concepts and their links to alcohol use (Catanzaro and Laurent, 2004; Cooper et al., 1995; Cronin, 1997; Nagoshi et al., 1994; Read et al., 2003). Studies demonstrated, for example, that drinking motives could explain variance in different alcohol-use measures (e.g., drinking frequency and usual quantity and frequency of five-plus drinking and drunkenness), even when alcohol expectancies were controlled for (Nagoshi et al., 1994); but the inverse could not be demonstrated (Cronin, 1997).
To our knowledge, expectancies and motives can easily be compared in their relation to alcohol use in three domains (i.e., enhancement, coping, and social). Enhancement expectancies (e.g., "drinking alcohol makes me feel chilled out or friendly") have been shown to be related to enhancement motives (e.g., "drinking to have fun or to get high"), which in turn are related to alcohol use (Cooper et al., 1995; Read et al., 2003). The same has been shown for tension-reduction expectancies and coping motives (Cooper et al., 1995). We could identify only one study, however, that empirically tested whether tension-reduction expectancies, in particular, were mediated by coping motives (Catanzaro and Laurent, 2004). To our knowledge, no study has tested the mediation of drinking motives with regard to either the link between general expectancies and alcohol use or the connection between specific expectancies and motives other than tension reduction and coping. No study was found, for example, that investigated associations between social expectancies and social motives, although the latter is the most frequently cited motive among young people (Kuntsche et al., 2005).
Based on a nationally representative sample, the present study aims to confirm that coping motives mediate the link between tension-reduction expectancies and different measures of alcohol use. It also aims to test whether enhancement motives mediate the link between alcohol use and positive-change expectancies and improved ability expectancies. A further objective is to investigate whether social motives mediate the link between changes in social-behavior expectancies and alcohol use. In addition, the study examines whether drinking motives in general mediate the link between expectancies (both drinking motives and expectancies measured by total scores) and alcohol use. Mediation occurs when the following three criteria are satisfied (Baron and Kenny, 1986): (1) variations in alcohol expectancies significantly account for variations in drinking motives; (2) variations in drinking motives significantly account for variations in the different alcohol-use measures; and (3) any significant association between alcohol expectancies and alcohol use disappears (i.e., is statistically nonsignificant) when drinking motives are included simultaneously in a model together with expectancies. Here, the clearest demonstration of mediation occurs when the link is reduced to zero or close to zero.
Method
Study design
The data base used for the analyses is part of the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Drugs (ESPAD; Hibell et al., 2004), which has been conducted every 4 years since 1995 in about 30 European countries. In 2003, the Swiss Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Drug Problems and the Addiction Research Institute jointly conducted the survey in Switzerland for the first time.
The present data were collected by means of a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that was sent to schools to be administered to each pupil in the relevant classes between the end of April and the end of June 2003. To avoid systematic dropouts, the exact date of the distribution of the questionnaires was not communicated to the school boards ahead of time. Teachers who administered the questionnaires in the classroom were advised only to respond to adolescents' queries about the procedure and to guarantee the independent completion of the questionnaire without interference from classmates. The time frame for filling out the questionnaires was one school lesson (about 45 minutes). According to the Helsinki Declaration (World Medical Association, 2002), the students could freely choose to participate, and confidentiality was ensured at all stages of the study.
Measures
An interdisciplinary research group from the participating countries developed the core ESPAD questionnaire (Hibell et al., 2004) and the Norwegian Short Form (NSF) of the Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire for Adolescents (AEQ-A; Aas, 1993); the adolescent version of the Drinking Motive Questionnaire Revised (DMQ-R, Cooper, 1994) was added for the Swiss survey. The resulting questionnaire subsequently was translated into the three languages most frequently spoken in Switzerland: German, French, and...
|
