Relevance of Athlete-Specific Psychosocial Factors in High School Student-Athlete Alcohol Consumption

Abstract

Background: Research suggests that adolescent student-athletes are at heightened risk for alcohol consumption. The identification of unique, modifiable risk factors for alcohol use in this population is needed. Purpose/Objectives: Building on previous work highlighting the importance of each of athlete-specific drinking motives and alcohol expectancies, this study investigated whether athlete-specific psychosocial predictors optimize our ability to predict adolescent athlete alcohol consumption after accounting for general psychosocial predictors. Methods: Participants were 352 current high school student-athletes who completed a self-report questionnaire about their alcohol use attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions. Results: Hierarchical regression revealed that among the total sample, gender, class year, liquid courage/sociability, sexuality, and negative alcohol expectancies, and negative athletic-functioning alcohol expectancies predicted alcohol consumption. Among lifetime drinkers, gender, class year, enhancement motives, conformity motives (negative), negative athlete-functioning alcohol expectancies, and sport-related coping motives predicted alcohol consumption. Conclusions/Importance: Negative athletic-functioning alcohol expectancies and sport-related coping motives emerged as important, athlete-specific predictors of adolescent athlete alcohol use. These factors provide important opportunities for targeted prevention efforts.

Keywords:

• Adolescents
• alcohol expectancies
• athletes
• drinking motives
• injunctive norms

Disclosure of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Although the present study used a similar high school student-athlete sample as Zamboanga et al. (2012) and Herring et al. (2016), in addition to having a distinct research question, this study differs in that we (a) included in-season and off-season athletes, (b) focused on alcohol consumption, (c) included lifetime drinkers and non-drinkers, and (d) considered a comprehensive selection of empirically and theoretically relevant psychosocial risk factors.