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Moving Beyond Drinking to Have a Good Time: a Person-Centered Approach to Identifying Reason Typologies in Legal-Aged College Student Drinkers

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Abstract

Alcohol use, reasons for use, and consequences of use continue to be a major concern in college student populations. This is especially true for students of legal drinking age who may experience different reasons for and greater negative consequences of alcohol use than students under 21 years old. Although multiple studies have used person-centered approaches to understand motivations for and ultimately prevent alcohol use, few have identified multiple typologies of reasons for alcohol use. The current study used latent class analysis to identify homogeneous subtypes of reasons for alcohol use and how classification was associated with alcohol-related consequences in college students aged 21 years old and older (N = 2300) from the 2013 Indiana College Substance Use Survey. Four profiles of reasons for alcohol use emerged across males and females: social drinkers, feel good drinkers, relaxed escaping drinkers, and emotion coping drinkers. Although the likelihood of consequences differed across gender, the emotion coping drinkers were more likely to experience all negative consequences, suggesting that it was a high-risk class. In general, this pattern of risk continued with the feel good drinkers and female relaxed escaping drinkers. These results can help optimize college substance use prevention and intervention efforts to (1) identify and understand characteristics of high- and low-risk student drinkers and (2) tailor the content of interventions to those specific profiles resulting in more effective approaches to reducing alcohol use.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge The Methodology Center at The Pennsylvania State University and specifically, Dr. Bethany Bray, for her assistance with this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Development, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

    Elizabeth H. Weybright, Brittany R. Cooper, Matthew F. Bumpus & Laura G. Hill

  2. Department of Applied Health Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Jonathon Beckmeyer

  3. Indiana Prevention Resource Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Jon Agley

Authors
  1. Elizabeth H. Weybright
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  2. Brittany R. Cooper
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  4. Matthew F. Bumpus
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  5. Laura G. Hill
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Correspondence to Elizabeth H. Weybright.

Ethics declarations

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committees and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Funding

Funding for data collection was provided through the Indiana Collegiate Action Network and the Indiana Division of Mental Health and Addiction.

Conflict of Interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Weybright, E.H., Cooper, B.R., Beckmeyer, J. et al. Moving Beyond Drinking to Have a Good Time: a Person-Centered Approach to Identifying Reason Typologies in Legal-Aged College Student Drinkers. Prev Sci 17, 679–688 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-016-0658-z

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