Drinking Motives, Sensation Seeking, and Alcohol Use Among Thai High School Students

Abstract

We assessed drinking motives and sensation seeking in relation to alcohol use in a sample of 634 Thai high school students. Results indicate that 55.8% had never used alcohol, and of the lifetime users, 33.5% were current (past month) alcohol users and 26.5% drink until they get drunk. Coping and social motives were positive predictors for drinking frequency, and coping motives were a predictor for hazardous (drinking to get drunk) drinking. Sensation seeking was associated with drinking frequency and hazardous drinking. Within the different sensation seeking components, disinhibition was the strongest predictor for drinking frequency, followed by experience seeking and boredom susceptibility. Boredom susceptibility was the strongest predictor for hazardous drinking. Coping, social motives, and sensation seeking should be taken into account when designing alcohol use prevention strategies for Thai adolescents.

The Impulsivity and Drinking Motives as Predictor of the Alcohol Consumption in College Students

“…However, Siviroj, Peltzer, Pengpid, Yungyen, and Chaichana (2012) found that this type of motives is related to the frequency of consumption. The results of this research showed that such motives were the highest percentage of variance explained on alcohol, which further agrees with the findings of Siviroj et al (2012).…”

“…Some studies indicate reasons that such problems are associated with alcohol use (Cooper, 1994;Cutter & O'Farrell, 1984;McCarty & Kaye, 1984), as well as frequent consumption (Siviroj et al, 2012), which corroborates the findings in this research.…”

Exploring Family and Community Involvement to Protect Thai Youths from Alcohol and Illegal Drug Abuse

“…This rate of alcohol consumption in Thai teenagers is substantially higher than that reported in a previous study (33.5% prevalence). 21 It has also been claimed that alcohol is commonly used along with illegal drugs, especially methamphetamine, in Thai teenagers, 22 but this was not clearly shown in this study. Using illegal drugs in Thai society is subject to strong penalties and stigma and it may be that these findings are one outcome of the government's "war on drugs" legislation (which has attempted to reduce the number of drug users by implementing strong penalties for drug possession).…”

Comparison of the Original and Short Form Drinking Motives Questionnaire–Revised With High School and Underage College Student Drinkers

“…It should be no surprise then that the DMQ-R has received widespread adoption as a research and assessment tool in recent years. It has been used with Chinese (Cheng, Phillips, Zhang, & Wang, 2016; Sun, Windle, & Thompson, 2015), Sri Lankan (Perera & Torabi, 2009), Portuguese (Martin, Ferreira, Haase, Martins, & Coelho, 2016), Brazilian (Hauck-Filho, Teixeira, & Cooper, 2012), Swedish (Öster, Arinell, & Nehlin, 2016), Dutch (Crutzen, Kuntsche, & Schelleman-Offermans, 2013), Thai (Siviroj, Peltzer, Pengpid, Yungyen, & Chaichana, 2012), and other samples. More recent psychometric work with the DMQ-R has focused on cross-cultural and cross-language equivalence and validity (e.g., Fernandes-Jesus et al, 2016).…”