(PS1-B38) Associations of Identity and Drinking Motives with Alcohol Outcomes Among College Students

Introduction: College is often associated with a developmental period during which consuming alcohol is at a lifetime high. So much so that when considering the identity of a “typical student,” the profile often includes the consumption of alcohol. In part, alcohol consumption in college settings is driven by social influences. Due to the prevalence of these influences across college campuses, students may tend to navigate toward an identity that favors drinking. As students begin to identify strongly with the identity of a “student,” concern arises regarding the potential for heightened alcohol use due to the desire to meet the “student” identity to fit in socially. The present research thus examines the extent to which social motives for drinking mediate the relation between “student” ingroup identity, social drinking motives, and alcohol use.

Method: Secondary analyses were conducted with a sample of college students enrolled in a large RCT testing a variety of personalized normative feedback interventions (Larimer et al., 2023). Inclusion criteria entailed at least one occasion of heavy episodic drinking in the past month. The present analytic sample (N=1173) was 62.8% female, 19.9 years old on average, and 62.2% identified as non-Hispanic White. Given the mediation modelling, we ensured temporal precedence by using students’ self-reported social identity collected at baseline, social drinking motives collected at the 3-month follow-up, and alcohol use and consequences collected at the 6-month follow-up. Mediation was tested using the joint-significance approach with Monte-Carlo simulation to estimate confidence intervals. All models controlled for age, sex assigned at birth, race ethnicity, campus the participant attended, and the RCT group to which participants were randomized (to control for intervention effects).

Results: The ‘a’ path was statistically significant; “student” social identity strength predicted social drinking motives (b=.08, p< .001). The ‘b’ path was also significant; social drinking motives predicted consuming more drinks in a typical week (b=.20, Count Ratio = 1.22 [1.20, 1.25], p< .001). Joint-significance test revealed that social drinking motives significantly mediated the effect of social identity strength on weekly drinking, explaining 20% of the total effect (95% CI: 15%, 23%). Specifically, the indirect effect through social drinking motives was b=.02, p< .001, and the total effect was b=.08, p< .001.

Conclusion: The results from this study elucidate the importance of considering the interaction between identity and social drinking motives when examining alcohol consumption in college settings. We discuss the implications of incorporating the impact of gravitating toward a “student identity” within prevention measures that target college students. Furthermore, we also discuss the potential generalizability to cultures in which there may be social influences and strong identity factors associated with consuming alcohol.