Identifying Risky Drinking Patterns Over the Course of Saturday Evenings: An Event-Level Study

Gaining a better understanding of young adults' excessive drinking on nights out is crucial to ensure prevention efforts are effectively targeted. This study aims to identify Saturdays with similar evening drinking patterns and corresponding situation-specific and person-specific determinants. Growth mixture modeling and multilevel logistic regressions were based on 3,084 questionnaires completed by 164 young adults on 514 evenings via the Internet-based cell phone optimized assessment technique (ICAT). The results showed that the 2-group solution best fitted the data with a "stable low" drinking pattern (64.0% of all evenings, 0.2 drinks per hour on average, 1.5 drinks in total) and an "accelerated" drinking pattern (36.0%, increased drinking pace from about 1 drink per hour before 8 p.m. to about 2 drinks per hour after 10 p.m.; 11.5 drinks in total). The presence of more same-sex friends (ORwomen = 1.29, 95% CI [1.09-1.53]; ORmen = 1.35, 95% CI [1.15-1.58], engaging in predrinking (ORwomen = 2.80, 95% CI [1.35-5.81]; ORmen = 3.78, 95% CI [1.67-8.55] and more time spent in drinking establishments among men (ORmen = 1.46, 95% CI [1.12-1.90] predicted accelerated drinking evenings. Accelerated drinking was also likely among women scoring high on coping motives at baseline (ORwomen = 2.40, 95% CI [1.43-4.03] and among men scoring high on enhancement motives (ORmen = 2.36, 95% CI [1.46-3.80]. To conclude, with a total evening consumption that is almost twice the threshold for binge drinking, the identified accelerated drinking pattern signifies a burden for individual and public health. Promoting personal goal setting and commitment, and reinforcing self-efficacy and resistance skills training appear to be promising strategies to impede the acceleration of drinking pace on Saturday evenings.