Let's Get This Party Started: The Effects of Descriptive and Injunctive Norms on Preparty Behavior in College Students

Abstract

Participants (N = 202) were students at a college in the northeastern United States who participated in the 2010 Core Alcohol and Drug survey. Data were collected on prepartying behavior, preparty social norms, and individual-difference variables. Using multivariate logistic and least-squares regression, it was found that descriptive social norms were associated with prepartying in women and injunctive social norms were associated with prepartying in men. Prepartying also was found to be negatively related to underage status and GPA in women and positively related to Greek membership and athlete status in men. Implications for social-norms interventions and suggestions for future social-norms research are discussed.

Keywords :

• prepartying
• pregaming
• college student drinking
• descriptive social norms
• injunctive social norms

THE AUTHORS

Patricia C. Rutledge, Ph.D., currently is a Professor of Psychology at Allegheny College. Previously, she has been a Professor of Psychology at Lincoln University of Missouri and a Research Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri –Columbia. Her research interests are centered on college student health behaviors, particularly alcohol use and, more recently, the role of alcohol policy in prevention.

Barbara J. McCarthy, a graduate of Allegheny College, currently is completing a Master's program in Organizational Sciences with a concentration in Human Resources Management at The George Washington University. Her research experience is in the area of social psychology and alcohol use.

Rebecca M. Lendyak, M.Ed., a graduate of Allegheny College, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 with an M.Ed. in Counselor Education. She currently is the school counselor and testing coordinator for Powhatan Jr. High School in Virginia, where she plans to implement a social norms campaign aimed at reducing illicit behavior such as drug and alcohol use.

GLOSSARY

• Descriptive social norms: One's perceptions of how other people behave. For example, in the case of prepartying, perceptions about how frequently others are engaging in prepartying and perceptions about how much alcohol others consume when prepartying.

• Injunctive social norms: One's perceptions of other peoples’ approval of a behavior. For example, in the case of prepartying, perceptions about how much others approve or disapprove of prepartying.

• Prepartying: The consumption of alcohol in a private setting prior to going to a primary venue, which might be a party or some other event such as a concert. This activity, also called pregaming, predrinking, pre-event drinking, preloading, and front-loading, often involves rapid alcohol consumption.

Notes

1 A total of 210 students responded to the survey; however, eight of these students did not provide any prepartying data.

2 The underage status variable was coded 1 = underage and 0 = legal-age because it was expected that underage participants would be more likely to engage in prepartying than legal-age participants. Given that the reverse was found, however, the odds ratios for underage status of OR = .35 and OR = .36 were inverted to more clearly illustrate that the odds of prepartying were OR = 1/.36 = 2.78 to OR = 1/.35 = 2.86 times greater for legal-age participants than for underage participants.

3 Follow-up analyses were conducted to test the statistical significance of the interactions of gender and preparty norms within the context of the multivariate analyses presented in Tables 3 and 4. Prior to creating the interaction terms for these analyses, the social norm variables were centered to a mean of zero to remove nonessential collinearity (Aiken & West, 1991). The follow-up analyses revealed that: (1) the interaction of gender with preparty quantity norms was a statistically significant predictor of preparty status, p = .002; (2) the interaction of gender with preparty frequency norms was a statistically significant predictor of preparty frequency among prepartiers, p = .002; (3) the interaction of gender with preparty quantity norms was nearly statistically significant as a predictor of preparty quantity, p = .056; and (4) the interaction of gender with preparty injunctive norms was a statistically significant predictor of preparty quantity, p = .034.