Identifying salient social, environmental, and situational contexts of college drinking: Impacts across drinking outcomes.

Background and objectives: Drinking context, such as where, why, and under what social conditions drinking occurs, is consistently associated with daily variability in alcohol use. However, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) requires very brief measurement, not allowing for as many contextual assessments as researchers may like. The current investigation examined common contextual predictors and their associations with different alcohol outcomes.

Methods: A sample of N = 528 college drinkers completed three surveys about their most recent drinking episode. This included contextual predictors (location, social context, who was present, alcohol offers, and drinking motives), as well as typical drinking outcomes (number of drinks, estimated blood alcohol concentration, perceived level of drunkenness) and high-risk drinking outcomes (binge drinking, blacking out, passing out). The current study used a traditional longitudinal design, allowing for inclusion of longer assessments of drinking than EMA can accommodate.

Results: The strongest predictors were consistent across outcome types, including with whom participants were drinking, number of people present, and alcohol offers. Despite consistent significant prediction of outcomes, drinking location accounted for little variance in alcohol outcomes. Social and enhancement motives had stronger links to outcomes in this sample of general college drinkers than conformity or coping drinking motives.

Discussion and conclusions: Although numerous options are available for assessing drinking context, some predictors are more impactful than others.

Scientific significance: Findings may help researchers using traditional daily diary or EMA designs focus on the context-specific predictors with the most impact on their outcomes of interest in their limited number of assessment items.