The role of drinking motives in social anxiety and alcohol use
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 239 undergraduate student volunteers from the Psychology Subject Pool (59 percent women; mean age = 19.7, SD = 1.5) who reported alcohol use during their lifetime (see Table 1). The majority of the participants were single (99 percent) and Caucasian (90 percent). Nearly half of the students were in the first year of college (46 percent). The majority of the students reported at least one binge-drinking episode (n = 187; 78 percent), and most reported two or more binge-drinking
Results
Demographic and study variable summaries for the whole sample and by social anxiety group are presented in Table 1. The sample had a mean SPAI score of 49.88 that is comparable to means found in college student samples (e.g., Turner et al., 1989). Post hoc analyses indicated that the high social anxiety group reported drinking less per occasion than the low social anxiety group. The three social anxiety groups varied in SPAI scores as expected. Chi-square analyses indicated a trend for a
Discussion
The purpose of the current study was to understand the relationship between social anxiety and drinking in college students by conducting an initial investigation regarding the role of drinking motives. Results indicate that social anxiety was unrelated to alcohol-related problems and had a small negative association with typical weekly alcohol use. Further, social anxiety was unrelated to drinking motives. Although the findings did not support hypotheses that social anxiety would be positively
Acknowledgements
This paper was supported in part by a National Research Service Award Predoctoral Fellowship (1 F31 AA13462-01A1) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism awarded to the first author. The authors express gratitude to the undergraduate research assistants who assisted with the project.
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