Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1111/ajad.70065

Publication Title

American Journal on Addictions

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

9 pp.

Abstract

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.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Original Publication Citation

Braitman, A. L., Shipley, J. L., Strowger, M., & Renzoni, E. S. (2025). Identifying salient social, environmental, and situational contexts of college drinking: Impacts across drinking outcomes. American Journal on Addictions. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajad.70065

ORCID

0000-0003-2259-1094 (Braitman), 0000-0002-8476-5099 (Strowger),

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