Development and Validation of the Drinking Motive Questionnaire Revised Short Form (DMQ–R SF)

Abstract

A short form of the Drinking Motive Questionnaire Revised (DMQ-R; Cooper, 1994) was developed, using different item selection strategies based on a national representative sample of 5,617 12- to 18-year-old students in Switzerland. To confirm the concurrent validity of the short-form questionnaire, or DMQ-R SF, data from a second national sample of 2,398 12- to 17-year-old students were analyzed by means of structural equation modeling. The results confirmed the four-dimensional factor structure of the DMQ-R SF both in general and among subpopulations. The mean values as well as the links with alcohol use and related problems were similar to those obtained with the original DMQ-R. These results support the potential use of the DMQ-R SF in a wide range of international studies that measure drinking motives.

Drinking Motives and Links to Alcohol Use in 13 European Countries

“…With an overall CFI of at least .95 and an SRMR of .034 and consistent with previous research (Kuntsche and Kuntsche, 2009;Mazzardis et al, 2010;Németh et al, 2011aNémeth et al, , 2011b, the results showed a good model fi t of the DMQ-R SF across age groups. It was only in some countries (e.g., Estonia and Portugal) that the model fi t was somewhat poorer.…”

“…Only in the past few years have studies in a range of more diverse countries such as Great Britain (Atwell et al, 2011;Bruce et al, 2012), Germany (Wurdak et al, 2010), Hungary (Németh et al, 2011a;Urbán et al, 2008), Italy (Graziano et al, 2010;Mazzardis et al, 2010), the Netherlands (Crutzen and Kuntsche, 2013;SchellemanOffermans et al, 2011), Spain (Mezquita et al, 2011;Németh et al, 2011b), and Sweden (Comasco et al, 2010) investigated the structure of drinking motives and/or their links to alcohol-related outcomes. The evidence from these studies and from previous research is fairly consistent in that adolescents reported that they drank most often for social motives, followed by enhancement, coping, and conformity motives in that order (Cooper, 1994;Kuntsche and Kuntsche, 2009;Kuntsche et al, 2008).…”

“…The 12-item DMQ-R SF (Kuntsche and Kuntsche, 2009) was used to assess enhancement, social, conformity, and coping motives for drinking in the last 12 months. Each dimension comprises three items and was rated on a relative frequency scale.…”

“…Based on a sample from 13 countries across Europe comprising 33,813 alcohol-using adolescents that together cover the age range from early to late adolescence (ages 11-19 years), the present study aimed to test the following hypotheses: (a) the four-dimensional factor structure can be confi rmed by using the DMQ-R Short Form (DMQ-R SF) (Kuntsche and Kuntsche, 2009); (b) social motives are most frequently indicated followed by enhancement, coping, and conformity motives; (c) social motives are associated with drinking frequency but not with drunkenness frequency; (d) enhancement motives, followed by coping motives, are most strongly positively related to the frequency of drunkenness; (e) conformity motives are inversely related to both drinking and drunkenness frequency; and (f) hypotheses (a) through (e) hold in all adolescent age groups across all 13 countries.…”

Reciprocal Influences of Drinking Motives on Alcohol Use and Related Consequences: A Full Cross-Lagged Panel Study Among Young Adult Men

“…33 Participants were asked to indicate their frequency of drinking for each of the 12 specific reasons in the last 12 months using a five-point Likert scale ranging from (almost) never (coded 1) to (almost) always (5). The mean score per motive dimension was used (Cronbach's α varying between 0.82 and 0.87).…”