The Influence of Drinking Buddies: A Longitudinal Investigation of Drinking Motivations and Drinking Behaviors in Emerging Adults

Abstract

Background: Heavy alcohol consumption and frequent alcohol use are associated with many adverse social and physical consequences. The different motivations underlying why people drink predict different patterns of alcohol consumption. A drinking buddy (i.e. a friend with whom a person drinks alcohol) influences a person’s drinking via social learning, leading to escalations in drinking over time. Purpose: Few studies have investigated drinking motives among peers and none have studied whether the drinking motives of a drinking buddy can influence another person’s drinking behavior; we sought to fill that gap. Method: Same-sex drinking buddies (N = 174; 66.1% female) were assessed once monthly for four months using self-report questionnaires. Participants were on average 18.66 years-old (SD = 1.17). Results: Indistinguishable actor–partner interdependence models using multilevel path analysis were conducted, with each drinking motive predicting drinking frequency and quantity, respectively. There were significant actor effects for social, enhancement, conformity, and coping motives; moreover, the enhancement, social, and coping-anxiety motives of the drinking buddy influenced the individual’s drinking frequency across the four months of the study. Conversely, only the enhancement motives of the buddy predicted drinking quantity in the individual when averaged across time. Sex was not a significant moderator of these effects. Importance: When targeting risky drinking behavior in a therapeutic context, assessing and addressing a person’s reasons for drinking, as well as their drinking buddy’s reasons for drinking, may reduce the risk of escalations in either friend’s drinking frequency over time.

Keywords:

• Alcohol use
• drinking buddies
• drinking motives
• social learning theory
• longitudinal

Acknowledgements

Michelle Tougas, Trevor Shannon, Brett Hopkins, Lauren Shenkar, Kyra Farrelly, Nacera Hanzal, Jocelyn Brown, Kaitlin Coker, Sarah Wells, Pam Collins, and Jennifer Swansburg are thanked for their research assistance.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 One research paper has been published utilizing a subsample of this dataset. It examined the social matching of alcohol consumption in drinking buddy dyads, and the impact of extraversion on this drinking behaviour (Nogueira-Arjona et al., 2019).

2 Results remained consistent with or without the outliers included.

3 Consistent with Kehayes et al. (2019), drinking outcomes for abstainers on any given month were coded as missing data as opposed to zeros. This meant that when only one buddy drank in a specific month, their data was used to calculate actor effects (but not partner effects). When both buddies drank in a specific month, their data was used to calculate actor and partner effects. When both buddies did not drink in a specific month, they were excluded from the model.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), under Grant number 435-2015-17, awarded to Sherry H. Stewart, Sean P. Mackinnon, Simon B. Sherry, and Kenneth E. Leonard. Ivy-Lee L. Kehayes was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier (CGS) Doctoral Scholarship from SSHRC and the IODE War Memorial Scholarship. Sherry H. Stewart is supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Addictions and Mental Health.