University students' motives for drinking alcohol are related to evening preference, poor sleep, and ways of coping with stress

Abstract

Does evening circadian preference predict university students’ motives for drinking alcohol (i.e. social, enhancement, conformity, or coping motives)? Drinking to cope, which is associated with alcohol problems, may be more common in evening types because of their sleep problems and difficulties in dealing with stress. Two hundred and nineteen university students (M age = 21.80, SD = 6.80) completed online the Composite Scale of Morningness, the Drinking Motives Questionnaire Revised, the Sleep Quality Scale, the COPE measure of coping with stress, a measure of socially desirable responding, and gave information about gender and age. Evening preference was associated with greater use of all drinking motives, and with poorer sleep and poorer coping with stress. Multiple regression showed that drinking to cope was best predicted by poor sleep, social drinking, and avoidant coping with stress (R ² = 0.45). Poor sleep and drinking to cope are a cause for concern because of possible reciprocal causality.

Keywords:

• circadian preference
• alcohol
• university students
• drinking motives
• drinking to cope

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the students for participating in this study and MacEwan University for providing the infrastructure for the research.