Testing a beverage-context explanation for caffeinated beverage consumption motives in Japan using beverage-specific...

Motives for consuming caffeinated beverages may vary by beverage type, yet it remains unclear whether the suboptimal fit of the provisional Japanese version of the Motives for Caffeine Consumption Questionnaire (MCCQ-J) reflects beverage-specific contexts, such as green tea, in Japan. This study compared all-beverage vs. beverage-specific responding on the MCCQ-J and profiled beverage-wise motives.

Two online surveys were conducted using a provisionally translated Japanese version of the MCCQ (MCCQ-J), prepared through forward-backward translation without full linguistic validation. In Survey 1, the MCCQ-J was completed by 1,530 individuals (20-59 years) considering all caffeinated beverages (all-beverage framing). In Survey 2, 1,190 follow-up participants who consumed at least one of the four target beverages completed the MCCQ-J under beverage-specific framing, limiting responses to a single beverage type. Six subscale scores (habit, alertness, mood, social, taste, and symptom management) were calculated as in the original study, and six-factor model fit, internal consistency, and measurement invariance across beverage types were evaluated.

The six-factor model fit was suboptimal under all-beverage framing and did not uniformly improve under beverage-specific framing. Invariance patterns across beverage pairs were not specific to green tea, making the findings inconsistent with a green-tea-specific explanation of misfit. In the four-group beverage-type comparison, full scalar invariance was unsupported, and acceptable partial scalar invariance could not be established. Therefore, beverage-type score differences were interpreted only descriptively. Mood motives appeared descriptively more prominent than in the original MCCQ study, but this observation should be interpreted cautiously because cross-national invariance was not tested.

Evidence for beverage-type comparability under the provisional MCCQ-J framework is limited, and the data are inconsistent with a green-tea-specific explanation of misfit. The findings offer descriptive references for Japanese caffeine-consumption motives and highlight the need for further refinement of the MCCQ-J (e.g., cognitive interviews, item rewording, pilot testing).