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Do Drinking Motives and Drinking Contexts Mediate the Relationship Between Social Avoidance and Alcohol Problems? Evidence from Two Studies of Undergraduate Drinkers

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Abstract

Research suggests drinking motives and drinking context mediate the relation between social anxiety and alcohol problems. Study 1 examined coping with anxiety motives (CAM) and coping with depression motives (CDM) as distinct mediators in a self-report cross-sectional study of 263 undergraduate drinkers. CDM mediated the relation between social avoidance and alcohol problems (indirect effect = 0.07). Study 2 included drinking contexts and motives as mediators in a single model and included an additional coping with social anxiety drinking motive (CSAM) mediator in a self-report cross-sectional study of 189 undergraduate drinkers. Undergraduates with high levels of social avoidance drank for both CDM and CSAM, which in turn predicted heavy drinking in risky contexts (indirect effects = 0.09–0.16); however, drinking motives, rather than risky contexts, largely mediated the relation of social avoidance to alcohol problems (indirect effects = 0.08–0.14). Taken together, these results suggest that CDM and CSAM independently mediate the relationship between social avoidance and alcohol problems and might serve as useful intervention targets.

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Notes

  1. Compared with the younger sample, the excluded older participants reported significantly lower coping with depression drinking motives [t(31.24) = 3.75, p = .001), alcohol problems [t(275) = 2.04, p = .042], and typical drinking quantity [t(276) = 2.37, p = .018]. This is to be expected given the well-established relationship between younger age and greater alcohol use (Livingston and Room 2009).

  2. While all participants reported consuming alcohol at least four times per month, three participants reported consuming 0 (i.e., less than one) standard drinks/drinking occasion, on average. These low-level-consumption participants were retained in the analyses as they met the drinking frequency inclusion criterion and because they provided drinking motives data.

  3. Loewenthal (1996) argues that a cutoff of .60 should be used to assess for adequate reliability with short scales of ten items or less.

  4. We also revised the overidentified model by fixing a random error to 1 to achieve fit indices. These indices indicated an adequate to good model fit, χ2(2) = 5.55, p = 0.06; RMSEA = 0.08, 90% CI [0.00, 0.17] (Little 2013), and CFI = 0.99 (Hu and Bentler 1999), and the conclusions remained the same as those reported in the main body of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford Street, PO Box 15000, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2, Canada

    Jamie-Lee Collins, Simon B. Sherry & Kyle McKee

  2. Psychology Department, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Kara Thompson

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Sherry H. Stewart

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Correspondence to Jamie-Lee Collins.

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest. All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible institutional committee on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in this set of studies.

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Collins, JL., Sherry, S.B., McKee, K. et al. Do Drinking Motives and Drinking Contexts Mediate the Relationship Between Social Avoidance and Alcohol Problems? Evidence from Two Studies of Undergraduate Drinkers. Int J Ment Health Addiction 19, 560–578 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-019-00092-3

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