This week I'm busy with fieldwork, looking at alcohol home delivery (more on that in a future post). Home delivery is a potentially big issue because it has become much more of the norm in the time since lockdowns. Home delivery also changes the dynamics of pre-drinking (and may actually lead to pre-drinking being the whole drinking experience for a lot more people). That would be a big change from some of my earlier research on pre-drinking (see more on that here).
Putting aside for a moment how home delivery affects pre-drinking, I was interested last week to read this new article by Florian Labhart, Koen Smit, Dan Anderson-Luxford, and Emmanuel Kuntsche (all La Trobe University), published in the journal Addictive Behaviors (sorry, I don't see any ungated version online). Labhart et al. collected data from 193 Swiss drinkers (from Lausanne and Zurich) on their motivations for pre-drinking, and the consequences of their pre-drinking. In terms of motivations, they used the Pre-Drinking Motivations Questionnaire (PMQ):
The PMQ assesses motivations to engage in pre-drinking alongside three dimensions; a) fun/intoxication (e.g., ‘Because it makes the rest of the evening more fun’, ‘To go out while already being properly drunk’), b) conviviality (e.g., ‘To meet new people’, ‘To have enough space to all be together’), and facilitation (e.g., ‘To increase self-confidence before going out’, ‘Because I cannot drink alcohol during the rest of the night’).
Consequences included:
...whether or not each of ‘the following situations occurred during or since last night’. Response options were ‘yes’ (coded as 1) or ‘no’ (0). Assessed consequences included hangover (headache, upset stomach, etc.), impaired driving (driving after drinking three or more alcoholic drinks or consuming illegal substances), blackout (inability to remember what happened, even for a short period of time), risky sex (unintended or unprotected sex), fight (involvement in a fight or a quarrel), and injury (injury to yourself or someone else).
Then comparing the consequences for different pre-drinking motivations (PDM) using regression models, they found that:
...higher conviviality PDM were associated with higher odds of risky sex and with lower odds of blackouts. Additionally, higher fun/intoxication PDM were associated with lower odds of risky sex. However, no association was found between PDM and hangovers, fights or injuries, and impaired driving over and above night level alcohol use.
Pre-drinking motivations seem to matter, at least a little bit. Those who are drinking to be convivial ('to meet new people') are more likely to engage in risky sex, which makes sense (for certain values of 'convivial'!). They are also less likely to experience blackouts, which makes sense given that they are less likely to drink excessively than those with other motives. I am a little surprised about the negative association between risky sex and pre-drinking for fun/intoxication. Labhart et al. don't have a convincing explanation for it (in fact, they don't mention it in their discussion at all). It may be a bit of an artefact of the analysis though, because:
...of the 193 participants who reported pre-drinking at least ‘some of the time’ in the baseline questionnaire and reported the consumption of at least one alcoholic drink, 55 were excluded from the analyses since they did not report any experience of alcohol-related consequences during the event-level study.
That seems like a really odd choice to me. If you are interested in the chances of a particular consequence of pre-drinking occurring, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to exclude pre-drinkers who experienced no consequences at all. In fact, omitting them likely biases the results, and it is disappointing that we don't get to see what the unconditional (or, at least, not conditional on at least one consequence) correlations between motivations and consequences are. On top of that, of course, the analysis only shows us what motivations are correlated with which consequences, and don't really tell us anything causal about the relationships.
Pre-drinkers' motivations probably affect how they approach their night of drinking and partying, and different motivations probably do alter the risks of different negative consequences occurring. However, this paper sadly stops short of really giving us a clear understanding of those relationships.
Read more:
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