Dyadic perspectives around online alcohol-facilitative communication

Objectives: This project investigates how emerging adult college students’ engagement with alcohol-related content online is associated with their frequency of alcohol use and heavy episodic drinking, using novel dyadic self-reported and peer-reported data. As youth use social media to post text and pictures about offline alcohol consumption to glorify and rehash drinking episodes, this may reshape youths’ perceptions of the extent to which drinking is normative in their peer network, and thus increase alcohol use risk. The present study sought to elucidate the ways in which college students’ engagement in online alcohol-facilitative communication is associated with their drinking (frequency of alcohol use and heavy episodic drinking) and a friend’s drinking. Methods: Drinking college students and a friend were recruited in dyads at UNC Chapel Hill (analytic sample N = 1,124, nested in 526 dyads); they self-reported on their past year frequency of alcohol use and heavy episodic drinking, engagement in online alcohol-facilitative communication, and perception of their friend’s past year frequency of drinking. Hybrid two-intercept actor-partner interdependence models tested intersections between the college student’s and their friend’s online alcohol-facilitative communication with their self-reported and peer-reported drinking frequency. Results: Consistent with hypotheses, college students who reported more online alcohol-facilitative communication endorsed a higher frequency of drinking and college students with a friend who reported more online alcohol-facilitative communication also reported a higher frequency of drinking. Contrary to my hypothesis, the interaction between the dyad members’ alcohol-facilitative communication was not associated with the college student’s frequency of drinking. Across all levels of the college student's alcohol-facilitative communication, their friend’s perception of their drinking was associated with the college student’s self-reported drinking, but this association was strongest when college students engaged in lower levels of alcohol-facilitative communication, which was contrary to the hypothesized direction. Conclusions: Analyses from the current study add to a growing body of literature suggesting that one’s own and their peer’s online posting of alcohol-related content influence drinking outcomes. This study was the first to examine whether peer descriptive norms are being shaped by one’s posting online of alcohol-related content, and it is evident that future research is needed to continue to understand how digital technology may play a role in reshaping peer descriptive norms