Religiosity as a moderator of the relation between sensation seeking and substance use for college-aged individuals

Substance use has been identified as a major problem on college campuses across the country, with excessive use often leading to unintended and unwanted negative health outcomes. Sensation seeking has been shown to be a consistent predictor of engagement in various health risk behaviors, including substance use. Religiosity has been shown to negatively predict substance use. However, there is mixed evidence on the relations among these risk and protective factors. This may be due to the operational definitions of religiosity in previous research. The current study investigated religiosity as a moderator of the relation between sensation seeking and substance use using robust measures of religiosity. The primary hypotheses were (a) sensation seeking would be positively associated with higher levels of heavy episodic drinking and marijuana use; (b) religiosity would be negatively associated with higher levels of substance use; and (c) religiosity would moderate the relation between sensation seeking and substance use such that, when religiosity was high, there would be no association between sensation seeking and substance use, but at low and moderate levels of religiosity, there would be a positive association between them. Religiosity was a significant moderator of the relation between risk seeking and marijuana use (p < .01), but it was less effective as a moderator between sensation seeking and heavy episodic drinking. Religiosity appears to have a stronger buffering effect for illegal drug use compared with alcohol use, perhaps in part because of the relative acceptance of alcohol consumption across major U.S. religious orientations.