Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

DOI

10.1037/pha0000068

Publication Title

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology

Volume

24

Issue

2

Pages

100-109

Abstract

In the current investigation, we sought to examine "day-of-the-week" drinking of an at-risk sample of nonstudent emerging adults and whether specific factors are associated with differential drinking patterns. Our study aims were to (a) identify differences in weekday versus weekend drinking, and (b) examine specific expectancies (i.e., sociability, tension reduction) and demographic factors (e.g., age, sex) relating to weekend versus weekday drinking after controlling for harmful drinking and holiday drinking. Participants were heavy-drinking noncollege attenders recruited from the community (N = 238; 63.4% men, 35.7% women; M age = 21.92 years). They reported daily drinking for the previous 30 days and completed measures of harmful drinking, alcohol expectancies, and demographic information. Results showed that more drinks were consumed on the weekends (i.e., Thursday to Saturday) than weekdays, with 63% of drinks consumed on weekends. Multilevel modeling analyses indicated that weekday drinking was associated with tension-reduction expectancies, social expectancies, sex, and age. Weekend-drinking increases were related to social expectancies, but not tension-reduction expectancies. Our final model indicated that, after controlling for the effect of holiday drinking, the within-person weekday-weekend distinction explained 18% of the total variance. In general, our findings highlight the importance of alcohol expectancies and drinking contexts in understanding the drinking behaviors of nonstudents. The differential role of tension-reduction and social-facilitation expectancies on drinking throughout the week imply that different cognitive pathways are involved in weekday versus weekend drinking, and both types of expected alcohol effects should be targets of risk-reduction efforts with nonstudent drinkers.

Comments

Note: This is the author's pre-print version of a work that was published in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. The final version was published as:

Lau-Barraco, C., Braitman, A. L., Linden-Carmichael, A. N., & Stamates, A. L. (2016). Differences in weekday versus weekend drinking among nonstudent emerging adults. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 24(2), 100-109. doi:10.1037/pha0000068

Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pha0000068

Original Publication Citation

Lau-Barraco, C., Braitman, A. L., Linden-Carmichael, A. N., & Stamates, A. L. (2016). Differences in weekday versus weekend drinking among nonstudent emerging adults. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 24(2), 100-109. doi:10.1037/pha0000068

ORCID

Braitman (0000-0003-2259-1094)

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