Daily relationship between event-specific drinking norms and alcohol use: a four-year longitudinal study

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Addiction Research
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Social influence processes, particularly descriptive drinking norms, play a crucial role in shaping individual alcohol consumption.
• Understanding the stability and changes in these social influence dynamics throughout the college years is essential for developing effective interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine how social-influence processes related to drinking norms operate in specific contexts.
• To investigate the stability and changes in these processes across the four years of college.

Main Methods:

• A measurement-burst design, combining longitudinal and daily diary methods, was employed with 523 college students over four years.
• Data collection included baseline surveys (gender, social anxiety) and daily diaries assessing personal and perceived peer drinking during social events.

Main Results:

• Men's social drinking increased slightly over four years, while women's remained steady.
• Higher event-specific descriptive drinking norms were associated with increased personal drinking, a relationship consistent over time and stronger in men.
• Men's norm perceptions increased, while women's decreased across the study years; social anxiety did not moderate the norm-drinking relationship.

Conclusions:

• Despite gender differences in drinking patterns and norm perception changes, the acute social influence of norms on personal drinking is a stable predictor throughout college.
• Findings can inform the development of targeted social influence-based interventions to reduce college student drinking.