Examination of a three-dimensional Drinking Motives Questionnaire in a young adult university student sample

The literature on drinking motives suggests that individuals drink for three distinct reasons: coping motives (CM: to reduce and/or avoid negative emotional states); social motives (SM: to affiliate with others); and enhancement motives (EM: to facilitate positive emotions). Cooper, Russell, Skinner and Windle (1992) [Psychological Assessment, 4, 123–132] developed a 3-dimensional self-report instrument, the Drinking Motives Questionnaire (DMQ), with subscales designed to assess relative frequency of drinking for each of these three motives. This study was designed to examine the psychometric properties of the DMQ in a large sample of young adult university students. Three hundred and fourteen students voluntarily served as subjects; 266 students (85% of the total sample; 196F and 70M) reported drinking on the DMQ. These students were divided into two age groups [20 yr and under (n = 117); 21 yr and older (n = 149)]. Analyses of variance indicated: (a) main effects of gender, with men scoring significantly higher on the DMQ-EM subscale and tending to score higher on the DMQ-SM subscale when compared to women; (b) a main effect of age group on the DMQ-EM subscale, with younger students scoring significantly higher than older students; and (c) a significant main effect of drinking motive, with the most relatively frequent drinking reported for SM and the least for CM overall. Although mild-to-moderate shared variance between subscales was noted, the three subscales of the DMQ were found to possess adequate-to-high levels of internal consistency. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that the hypothesized 3-factor model provided a better fit than either a unidimensional or 2-factor model in explaining the underlying structure of the DMQ. Some suggestions for improvements in DMQ item content are made. The present results replicate and extend previous findings by Cooper and colleagues to a sample of university students, and support the utility of using the DMQ in future investigations of the drinking motives of young adults.