Researchers focused on 614 participants who completed online surveys about their alcohol use from mid-February to mid-May 2022. Participants were an average of 21.5 years old and the majority were white (64.5 percent) and male (54.2 percent). About 65 percent were college students.
Among respondents, 49.9 percent reported being moderate drinkers, with 31.5 percent reporting five to nine drinks in a row in the previous two weeks and 18.6 percent reporting “high-intensity drinking” of 10 or more drinks in one day in the previous two weeks, according to researchers from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and Texas State University. The study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The top reasons participants gave for not drinking on a particular day were: “I didn’t feel like drinking” (83.4 percent of non-drinking days), followed by “I didn’t want to get drunk” (81.8 percent) and “I normally don’t drink on this night of the week” (58.7 percent, mainly Sunday through Thursday).
On more than half of the days they didn’t drink (58.4 percent), participants reported not drinking because they didn’t want alcohol to interfere with their school or work time. Nearly half of the days they didn’t drink (48.8 percent) occurred because participants in the study reported needing money for things other than alcohol.
There were other reasons too: on about 12 percent of the days when no drinking occurred, said they did not drink because they used another drug instead; of those who chose another drug, 81.8 percent said they used cannabis.
People’s motives for drinking were related to the reasons they said they didn’t drink on a given day, researchers found. For example, those who said they drank to fit in with a group were more likely to say they skipped drinking because they had no one to drink with, and those who said they drank for fun were more likely to say they used other drugs on days they didn’t drink. Hispanic participants were more likely to say they didn’t drink because they didn’t want alcohol to interfere with their school or work than their white counterparts.
While much research has been done on the reasons why people decide to drink alcohol, the researchers write, “Reasons for not drinking are surprisingly understudied.”
A better understanding of the personal and social factors that motivate people to abstain from alcohol could help future researchers formulate more effective public health information, they say.