Elsevier

Addictive Behaviors

Volume 37, Issue 8, August 2012, Pages 922-930
Addictive Behaviors

From Animal House to Old School: A multiple mediation analysis of the association between college drinking movie exposure and freshman drinking and its consequences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2012.03.030Get rights and content

Abstract

Does exposure to college drinking movies impact upon subsequent college student drinking? If so, what mechanisms mediate such an effect? In the first study to address these questions, we assessed college drinking movie exposure in a sample of 479 college freshmen early in their first semester and examined its relation to subsequent drinking and drinking consequences one month later. Hypothesized mediators of this effect included college alcohol beliefs (beliefs that drinking is central to college life), positive and negative alcohol expectancies, and descriptive and injunctive norms. Using bootstrapping procedures, results indicated that movie exposure exerted direct effects on both drinking and drinking consequences. Movie exposure also had significant indirect effects on drinking through all of the hypothesized mediators, with the exception of negative alcohol expectancies. All mediated movie exposure's effects on drinking consequences, with the exception of injunctive norms. Contrast analyses revealed that college alcohol beliefs had the strongest mediational effects in the relationship between movie exposure and both drinking and consequences. The implications of these findings for precollege alcohol education programs are discussed.

Highlights

► College alcohol beliefs (CAB) are beliefs that drinking is central to college life. ► College drinking movie exposure had direct effects on drinking and consequences. ► Movie exposure effects were mediated by CABs, alcohol expectancies, and norms. ► The strongest mediational effects were observed for CABs.

Introduction

Each year, more than three million college freshmen descend upon the nation's campuses to begin an important transitional period in life (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010). Yet, a significant obstacle to successfully negotiating this period is the college drinking culture – with associated “beliefs and customs – entrenched in every level of college students' environments” (NIAAA, 2002, p. 1). As a result of alcohol use, annually more than 1800 college students die, 597,000 are injured, 697,000 are physically assaulted, and 97,000 are sexually assaulted (Hingson, Zha, & Weitzman, 2009). Moreover, alcohol use has been found to be significantly associated with attrition from college once social engagement is statistically controlled (Martinez, Sher, & Wood, 2008). Thus, the human toll of the college drinking culture is high.

Students arrive on campus with varying beliefs and expectations about the college experience. Some are fully committed to academic development, whereas others view immersion in the drinking culture as equally if not more important than academics. To assess individual differences in the extent to which students identify with the college drinking culture, Osberg et al. (2010) recently developed the College Life Alcohol Salience Scale (CLASS), which assesses students' beliefs about the centrality of alcohol to the college experience. The 15-item CLASS includes items such as “To become drunk is a college rite of passage,” “I think students who do not go out to parties or bars are not enjoying their college experience,” “College is a time for experimentation with alcohol,” “It is okay to drink in college, even if you are under age,” and “The chance to drink and party in college is just as important as the academic experience.” Scores on the CLASS were predictably related to a nomological network of drinking and personality variables and it provided incremental validity in the prediction of drinking frequency and amount, when compared to drinking motive scores. Osberg, Insana, Eggert, and Billingsley (2011) further demonstrated that scores on the CLASS provided incremental validity in predicting drinking and its consequences when added to other well established predictors of college student drinking, including alcohol expectancies and perceived descriptive and injunctive norms.

In light of its incremental validity in predicting drinking and its consequences among college students, the college alcohol belief construct warrants further attention. An important question about college alcohol beliefs concerns their origins. What factors, prior to admission or during the college experience, influence the development of beliefs that alcohol is part of the fabric of college life? Undoubtedly, there are multiple influences including parental attitudes, peers' beliefs, and the mainstream media. Movies that glorify college drinking may be a particularly potent influence on the development of beliefs that drinking is central to college life. Films ranging from the classic, Animal House, to the more recent, Old School, have become a part of pop culture and strongly convey the impression that the college experience equates to a keg party. Thus, consistent with recent sociocognitive models of media influence (e.g., Buckley & Anderson, 2006), the present study tests a multiple mediation model wherein exposure to college drinking movies exerts indirect effects on freshman drinking and its consequences through college alcohol beliefs and other cognitions related to alcohol such as positive and negative alcohol expectancies and descriptive and injunctive norms.

There is accumulating evidence that exposure to movies depicting alcohol use increases the likelihood of alcohol use among adolescents (e.g. Bahk, 2001, Dal Cin et al., 2009, Dalton et al., 2010, Gibbons et al., 2010, Koordeman et al., 2010, Sargent et al., 2006, Tanski et al., 2010, Wills et al., 2009; see Fischer, Greitemeyer, Kastenmüller, Vogrincic, & Sauer, 2011 for a review). Sargent et al. conducted the first study to find evidence of a connection between degree of exposure to movies depicting alcohol and teen drinking. Both the Tanski et al. and Dalton et al. studies demonstrated that having less parental restrictions on watching R-rated movies was associated with increased odds of future alcohol use. Dal Cin et al. found that more favorable drinker prototypes, alcohol expectancies, willingness to drink, and friends' use of alcohol mediated the link between movie alcohol exposure and alcohol consumption. The results of the Wills et al. study showed that increased friends' use of alcohol mediated the effects of movie exposure on alcohol use among teens. Gibbons et al. found that movie exposure was associated with increased subsequent alcohol consumption 8 and 16 months later and that positive drinker prototypes, willingness to drink, and the tendency to affiliate with drinking friends, mediated these effects. Bahk, and Koordeman et al., conducted laboratory studies which revealed that exposure to a movie portraying alcohol increased favorability of alcohol attitudes among teens and actual drinking in young adults, respectively.

Given the foregoing research establishing a connection between exposure to movies depicting alcohol and teen drinking, it seems likely that drinking in college may be influenced by exposure to movies glorifying the college drinking culture. Even students who were non-drinkers in high school may hold the belief that drinking is integral to the college experience in part because of exposure to such movies. Consequently, a primary aim of the present study was to examine the potential link between exposure to college drinking movies and drinking and its consequences during the freshman year. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the relationship between college drinking movie exposure and college student drinking behavior. In addition, we sought to test the potential mediating role of college alcohol beliefs and several well established correlates of college drinking in the predicted connection between college drinking movie exposure and subsequent drinking and drinking consequences.

Sociocognitive models of media influences on behavior such as Buckley and Anderson's (2006) General Learning Model (GLM) and the Prototype Willingness Model (PWM; see Gerrard, Gibbons, Houlihan, Stock, & Pomery, 2008 for a review of relevant research) emphasize that media exposure impacts behavior through the activation of internal states including cognitions and emotions (see Fischer et al., 2011, for review of studies supporting the GLM), which can lead to volitional, but unplanned risky health behaviors (Gerrard et al.). In applying the GLM and PWM to the impact of exposure to college drinking movies on subsequent behavior, we propose that such exposure activates drinking-related cognitions such as beliefs about the role of alcohol in college life, expectancies about alcohol's effects, and beliefs about the prevalence and acceptability of drinking among college students. Alcohol expectancies and perceived norms have an extensive empirical base as mediators of freshman drinking (see Borsari, Murphy, & Barnett, 2007 for a review). Thus, we tested multiple mediation models of the influence of college drinking movie exposure on both drinking and drinking consequences in a freshman cohort of students. The model includes both direct effects of media exposure on the target measures, as well as five potential mediators of this relationship including college alcohol beliefs, positive and negative alcohol expectancies, and descriptive and injunctive norms for drinking (see Fig. 1).

We hypothesized that increased exposure to movies that glorify college drinking impact on viewers' beliefs about the role of alcohol in college life. Those with greater exposure to such movies are likely to develop stronger beliefs that alcohol is an inherent aspect of the college experience. This in turn leads to higher levels of drinking and drinking consequences. Moreover, we hypothesized that college drinking movie exposure impacts viewers' expectancies about the effects of alcohol. Movie portrayals tend to emphasize the positive effects of drinking (e.g., enhanced fun and increased comfort in social interaction) and minimize its negative consequences (e.g., poor academic performance, physical injury). These effects in turn lead to increased drinking and drinking consequences. Finally, we hypothesized that increased movie exposure leads to perceptions that the vast majority of college students drink (descriptive norms) and also that they find drinking to be highly acceptable (injunctive norms), which in turn leads to increased drinking and drinking consequences. We tested these hypotheses using multiple mediation analyses grounded in the use of bootstrapping methods designed to increase power and reduce Type I error rates (Preacher & Hayes, 2008).

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 598 first semester college freshmen at a northeastern university recruited from the required freshman seminar course. Each received course credit for their participation. Osberg et al. (2011) analyzed a portion of the data obtained from this cohort in establishing the incremental validity of college alcohol beliefs when added to positive and negative alcohol expectancies and descriptive and injunctive norms in predicting alcohol use and its consequences. The focus of the

Bivariate correlations and descriptive statistics for study variables

Table 1 displays the bivariate correlations between, and descriptive statistics for, the study variables. As can be seen, college drinking movie exposure was significantly associated with both drinking (r = 0.30) and drinking consequences (r = 0.28), effects that were at or near the medium effect size range (r = 0.30, Cohen, 1992). Among the hypothesized mediators of movie exposure's effects on drinking variables, college alcohol beliefs had the strongest association with movie exposure (0.34),

Discussion

The present study was the first to explore the connection between exposure to movies that glorify college drinking and subsequent college student drinking and its consequences. Movie exposure exerted both direct and indirect effects on these measures within a large sample of freshman students. Consistent with sociocognitive models of the effects of media on behavior, movie exposure demonstrated indirect effects on the drinking measures through cognitions related to drinking in college,

Conclusions

Exposure to movies glorifying the college drinking culture was found to have direct and indirect effects on the drinking behaviors of college freshmen in the present study. Several cognitive variables mediated the effects of movie exposure on drinking behavior including college alcohol beliefs, positive and negative alcohol expectancies, and descriptive and injunctive norms. Future research should focus on identifying other mechanisms that mediate the effects of movie exposure on drinking as

Role of funding sources

This research was supported by a grant from the Niagara University Research Council to the first author. The Niagara University Research Council had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation, writing the manuscript, or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Contributors

Osberg designed the study, conducted the literature search, performed the statistical analyses, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript and its revision. Billingsley, Eggert, and Insana assisted in the study design, data collection, literature search, and revision of the first draft. The authors have agreed to the order of authorship.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

We thank the many students who participated in this study and their instructors, without whose cooperation this research could not have been completed.

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