Stay Home, Drink at Home? A Daily Diary Study on College Students’ Alcohol and Social Media Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Background

COVID-19 and measures to contain it may have impacted college students’ behavior, including their drinking behavior. Students’ drinking may have decreased—for example, due to the closure of bars—but problematic drinking may have increased—for example, due to (solitary) drinking at home. Another behavior that has increased due to COVID-19 and the accompanying social isolation is students’ social networking site (SNS) use. This is worrisome because students’ SNS use has been shown to increase their alcohol use. Nevertheless, little research has investigated these behaviors and the possible link between them during a lockdown. Therefore, this study aimed to examine (1) whether students engaged in drinking during a lockdown, (2) whether they displayed their drinking behavior on SNSs, and (3) whether exposure to and posting of alcohol-related content was linked to their daily alcohol use.

Methods

337 college students (M_age = 20.63 years, SD_age = 1.55 years; 50.3% male) participated in a two-week daily diary study. Descriptive statistical analyses and generalized linear mixed modeling (GLMM) were deployed.

Results

Descriptive analysis results showed that during the week, students’ drinking occurred with friends in dormitories, while in the weekend, this behavior shifted to drinking with friends and parents at home. Moreover, students mostly saw visual and posted textual posts of this drinking on SNSs. Furthermore, GLMM revealed associations between exposure to alcohol postings, sharing of alcohol postings, and students’ probability of drinking on the same day.

Conclusion

This study provides important insights into students’ alcohol use and its underlying mechanisms during health crises.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• alcohol
• college students
• social media
• risk behavior
• pandemic

Declaration of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Funding

This work was supported by grants from Interne Fondsen KU Leuven/Internal Funds KU Leuven (project 3H190365). We thankfully acknowledge their support.

Notes

1 Chi-square tests showing that the coefficient for posting visual alcohol-related content was significantly higher than the others can be found in Section 9.3 of the Appendix.