Samuel F Acuff1, William W Stoops2, Justin C Strickland3. 1. Department of Psychology, The University of Memphis, 202 Psychology Building, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA. 2. Department of Behavioral Science, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 1100 Veterans Drive, Medical Behavioral Science Building Room 140, Lexington, KY, 40536, USA; Center on Drug and Alcohol Research, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 845 Angliana Ave, Lexington, KY, 40508, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, 110 Kastle Hall Lexington, KY, 40506, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 3470 Blazer Parkway, Lexington, KY, 40509, USA. 3. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 5510 Nathan Shock Drive, Baltimore, MD, 21224, USA. Electronic address: jstric14@jhmi.edu.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Behavioral economic theory predicts decisions to drink are cost benefit analyses, and heavy episodic drinking occurs when benefits outweigh costs. Social interaction is a known benefit associated with alcohol use. Although heavy drinking is typically considered more likely during more social drinking events, people who drink heavily in isolation tend to report greater severity of use. This study explicitly disaggregates between-person and within-person effects of sociality on heavy episodic drinking and examines behavioral economic moderators. METHODS: We used day-level survey data over an 18-week period in a community adult sample recruited through crowdsourcing (mTurk; N = 223). Behavioral economic indices were examined to determine if macro person-level variables (alcohol demand, delay discounting, proportionate alcohol-related reinforcement [R-ratio]) interact with event-level social context to predict heavy drinking episodes. RESULTS: Mixed effect models indicated significant between-person and within-person social context associations. Specifically, people with a higher proportion of total drinking occasions in social contexts had decreased odds of heavy drinking, whereas being in a social context for a specific drinking occasion was associated with increased odds of heavy drinking. Person-level R-Ratio, demand elasticity, and breakpoint variables interacted with social context to predict heavy episodic drinking, such that the event-level social context association was stronger when R-Ratios, alcohol price insensitivity, and demand breakpoints were high. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate an ecological fallacy, in which the size and direction of effects were divergent at different levels of analysis, and highlight the potential for merging behavioral economic variables with proximal contextual effects to predict heavy drinking.
BACKGROUND: Behavioral economic theory predicts decisions to drink are cost benefit analyses, and heavy episodic drinking occurs when benefits outweigh costs. Social interaction is a known benefit associated with alcohol use. Although heavy drinking is typically considered more likely during more social drinking events, people who drink heavily in isolation tend to report greater severity of use. This study explicitly disaggregates between-person and within-person effects of sociality on heavy episodic drinking and examines behavioral economic moderators. METHODS: We used day-level survey data over an 18-week period in a community adult sample recruited through crowdsourcing (mTurk; N = 223). Behavioral economic indices were examined to determine if macro person-level variables (alcohol demand, delay discounting, proportionate alcohol-related reinforcement [R-ratio]) interact with event-level social context to predict heavy drinking episodes. RESULTS: Mixed effect models indicated significant between-person and within-person social context associations. Specifically, people with a higher proportion of total drinking occasions in social contexts had decreased odds of heavy drinking, whereas being in a social context for a specific drinking occasion was associated with increased odds of heavy drinking. Person-level R-Ratio, demand elasticity, and breakpoint variables interacted with social context to predict heavy episodic drinking, such that the event-level social context association was stronger when R-Ratios, alcohol price insensitivity, and demand breakpoints were high. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate an ecological fallacy, in which the size and direction of effects were divergent at different levels of analysis, and highlight the potential for merging behavioral economic variables with proximal contextual effects to predict heavy drinking.
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