The Role of Drinking Beliefs to Explain Ethnic Variation in Drinking Practices Among U.S. College Students

Abstract

This study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, examines psychosocial mediators to explain discrepancies in past-30-day drinking between African American and White college student drinkers in the United States. Between 2008 and 2010, 5,845 college drinkers completed an online survey about their alcohol use. Using latent variable structural equations modeling, we investigated the relationships between ethnicity, drinking beliefs, and students’ past 30-day alcohol use. Drinking beliefs—i.e., positive expectancies, perceived norms, and disapproval of alcohol use—fully mediated the relationship between ethnicity and drinking behaviors. Study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Longitudinal Associations Between Alcohol‐Related Cognitions and Use in African American and European American Adolescent Girls

“…The present work builds on existing literature on the relationship between alcohol-related cognitions and adolescent alcohol use, which to date has primarily focused on the examination of cognitions as predictors of use and been largely limited to samples of predominantly European ancestry (e.g., Antin et al, 2014; Christiansen et al, 1989; Maddahian et al, 1988). Our study expands on the current body of research in several important ways.…”

“…Several studies have assessed for distinctions between AA and EA youth in positive expectancies. With few exceptions (see Corvo, 2000), positive expectancies have been found to be higher in European Americans (Antin et al, 2014; Chartier et al, 2009; Randolph et al, 2009; Slutske et al, 2002). The magnitude of the association between positive expectancies and initiation of alcohol use also appears to be stronger in EA than AA youth (Banks et al, 2017; Chartier et al, 2009).…”

“…As in the case of alcohol expectancies, attitudes toward alcohol use develop before alcohol is ever consumed (Johnson et al, 1997) and attitudes during childhood have been shown to predict experimentation with alcohol (i.e., sipping) by age 12 (Donovan and Molina, 2014). Investigations of attitudes toward alcohol use have consistently found - from elementary school aged children (Rinehart et al, 2006) to college students (Antin et al, 2014) to women from the general population (Herd, 1997) - that African Americans tend to hold less positive attitudes toward alcohol use than European Americans.…”

“…Toward that end, we assessed the extent to which alcohol-related expectancies, attitudes, and intention to drink predicted subsequent alcohol use, and whether alcohol use in turn predicted these alcohol-related cognitions in AA and EA girls from ages 12 to 17. African Americans have shown delayed alcohol onset in comparison to European Americans (Galvan and Caetano, 2003, Zapolski et al, 2014) and there may be a corresponding delay in the development of relationships between cognitions and use for African Americans (Antin et al, 2014). Given our focus on the early period of risk for alcohol involvement, we expected to observe a greater magnitude of association between cognitions and use for EA than AA girls.…”

Cultural socialization and alcohol use: The mediating role of alcohol expectancies among racial/ethnic minority youth

“…The authors believe this suggests that youth may engage in alcohol use due to the belief that alcohol will reduce stress. Among African American youth there is also evidence of an association between positive expectancies and drinking frequency, such that higher positive expectancies are predictive of greater use ( Chartier, Hesselbrock, & Hesselbrock, 2009 ; Meier, Slutske, Arndt, & Cadoret, 2007 ), whereas lower positive expectancies are related to decreased use ( Antin, Lipperman-Kreda, Paschall, Marzell, & Battle, 2014 ). However, there are others who have observed a null effect for both the relationship between positive alcohol expectancies and alcohol use ( Banks & Zapolski, 2017 ) and negative alcohol expectancies and alcohol use ( Antin et al, 2014 ).…”