All it takes is one: drinking games, prepartying, and negative drinking consequences among high school students

Abstract

Prepartying (i.e. drinking before a social event/gathering) and participation in drinking games are two high-risk drinking behaviors practiced by adolescents. Engaging in both these drinking behaviors may contribute to a multiple risk paradigm, wherein the risk associated with one’s general drinking is combined with the additional risk of rapidly ingesting alcohol as a result of one or both these activities. The present study examines this paradigm among high school students who reported alcohol use (N = 240). Controlling for age and typical alcohol consumption, results indicated that participation in prepartying or drinking games was associated with more negative alcohol-related outcomes than non-participation. However, participation in both risky behaviors, as opposed to one, did not give rise to negative additive effects. Thus, students who participate in just one of these activities warrant the same attention from health professionals and school personnel as those who participate in both. Importantly, results also showed that students who reported drinking games participation and prepartying endorsed social and coping drinking motives just as frequently as students who only reported drinking games participation. However, students who engaged in multiple high-risk drinking behaviors were more inclined to drink to enhance the intensity of the “high” associated with alcohol use.

• Adolescents
• drinking games
• hazardous alcohol use
• prepartying

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our special thanks to Dr. David C. Palmer for his statistical assistance. We would also like to thank Kathryne Van Tyne for helping with the data management for this project.

Declaration of interest

Shannon Kenney's contribution to this paper was supported by a grant from ABMRF/The Foundation for Alcohol Research and grant number T32 AA007459 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health. Janine V. Olthuis' contribution to this paper was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. This investigation was supported by a grant to Byron L. Zamboanga from the Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development, Smith College.

Notes

¹We conducted ANCOVAs (controlling for age and typical alcohol use) to examine group differences in the mean number of negative drinking consequences as measured by the AUDIT. This model included students who prepartied but did not play drinking games (n = 13). Results indicated significant differences, F(2, 251) = 3.88, p = 0.010, partial η²= 0.05. The small number of students in the group that only reported prepartying precludes any meaningful interpretations of this analysis; however, for descriptive purposes, the mean number of negative drinking consequences is 1.29 (SD = 1.95) for students who did not participate in either activity; 2.08 (SD = 2.87) for those who only prepartied; 2.89 (SD = 3.47) for those who only played drinking games; and 3.46 (SD = 2.94) for those who participated in both activities.

²Due to our relatively small sample size, we conducted follow-up pairwise analyses (controlling for age and typical alcohol use) using the LSD test, which is less conservative than the Bonferroni test. Consistent with the Bonferroni results, no significant group differences were found between students who currently participated in drinking games and prepartying vs. those who played drinking games but did not preparty (p = 0.365).