Weighing the Pros and Cons of Using Alcohol Protective Behavioral Strategies: A Qualitative Examination among College Students.

BACKGROUND: Alcohol protective behavioral strategies (PBS) are behaviors engaged in immediately prior to, during, after, or instead of drinking with the explicit goal of reducing alcohol use, intoxication, and/or alcohol-related harms. Despite the quantitative support for alcohol PBS as a protective factor among college student drinkers, we know of no qualitative research aimed at determining college student drinkers' perceptions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of using PBS. OBJECTIVES: In the style of a decisional balance exercise, we asked college student drinkers (analytic n = 113) to identify 5 reasons they would not use PBS (cons) and 5 reasons they would use PBS (pros). METHOD: Participants (majority female, 77.0%) were recruited from a psychology department participant pool at a large, southeastern university in the United States. Within our analytic sample, participants on average consumed 6.38 (SD = 8.16) drinks per typical week of drinking and reported consuming alcohol on average 7.5 days (SD = 5.83) in the last 30 days. RESULTS: Using a descriptive phenomenological approach, we identified 2 themes for pros (prevention of specific negative alcohol-related consequences and general safety) and 4 themes for cons (goal conflict, ineffectiveness, difficulty of implementation, and negative peer/social repercussions). Overall, participants reported more pros than cons and this discrepancy (i.e., number of PBS pros minus number of PBS cons) was positively related to self-reported frequency of PBS use. Conclusions/Importance: Taken together, we hope that clinicians/researchers will probe individual's reasons for choosing to use (or not use) PBS in order to tailor or improve existing PBS-based interventions.

Depressive Symptoms and Alcohol-Related Problems Among College Students: A Moderated-Mediated Model of Mindfulness and Drinking to Cope.

OBJECTIVE: In college student samples, the association between depressive symptoms and alcohol-related problems has been found to be mediated by drinking-to-cope motives. Mindfulness-based interventions suggest that mindfulness may attenuate the conditioned response of using substances in response to negative emotional states, and trait mindfulness has been shown to be a protective factor associated with experiencing fewer alcohol-related problems. In the present study, we examined trait mindfulness as a moderator of the indirect associations of depressive symptoms on alcohol-related problems via drinking-to-cope motives. METHOD: Participants were undergraduate students at a large, southeastern university in the United States who drank at least once in the previous month (n = 448). Participants completed an online survey regarding their personal mental health, coping strategies, trait mindfulness, and alcohol use behaviors. The majority of participants were female (n = 302; 67.4%), identified as being either White non-Hispanic (n = 213; 47.5%) or African American (n = 119; 26.6%), and reported a mean age of 22.74 (SD = 6.81) years. Further, 110 (25%) participants reported having a previous and/or current experience with mindfulness mediation. RESULTS: As hypothesized, the indirect effects from depressive symptoms to alcohol-related problems via drinking-to-cope motives were weaker among individuals reporting higher levels of mindfulness than among individuals reporting lower and average levels of mindfulness. CONCLUSIONS: The present study suggests a possible mechanism through which mindfulness-based interventions may be efficacious among college students: decoupling the associations between depressive symptoms and drinking-to-cope motives.