Measuring alcohol-related protective behavioral strategies among college students: Further examination of the Protective Behavioral Strategies Scale.

Abstract

Heavy drinking among college students has been recognized as a public health problem on American college campuses (e.g., R. Hingson, T. Heeren, M. Winter, & H. Wechsler, 2005). Recently, protective behavioral strategies, or cognitive-behavioral strategies that can be implemented when using alcohol to reduce consumption and resulting negative consequences, have been shown to be associated with less alcohol use and fewer alcohol-related problems (e.g., S. L. Benton et al., 2004;M. P. Martens et al., 2005). The purpose of the present study was to conduct additional psychometric work on a measure designed to assess the use of such strategies: the Protective Behavioral Strategies Scale (PBSS; M. P. Martens et al., 2005). Data were collected on 505 undergraduate students from 2 universities who reported having consumed alcohol at least once in the past 30 days. Results of a confirmatory factor analysis supported the hypothesized 3-factor version of the PBSS, and scores on each subscale were correlated in the expected direction with both alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. Thus, the PBSS appears to be reliable and valid for use among college student drinkers. ,

Measuring Protective Behavioral Strategies for Marijuana Use Among Young Adults

“…Convergent validity of the scale was also conducted with the same sample used to generate the factor structure, which is consistent with other studies generating protective behavioral strategy scales for alcohol (Delva et al, 2004;Martens et al, 2005Martens et al, , 2007, but items may benefit from additional convergent validity testing outside this sample. Last, we did not specify a timeframe for the use of these strategies, as we modeled the scale of the widely used PBSS for alcohol (Martens et al, 2005(Martens et al, , 2007. Although the PBSM yields information about the general use of strategies, it limits understanding when the strategies were used in regard to the time-specific items assessing use (e.g., in the past month) and consequences (in the past 6 months).…”

“…Although this initial examination of the items gives us important information about the item loadings with this sample, it will be important to continue to test items in samples with more representative numbers of men. As other preliminary investigations of protective strategies scales have noted (Martens et al, 2005(Martens et al, , 2007, an in-depth examination of gender difference in the underlying structure of the PBSM items is beyond the scope of this article but is an area for future research efforts. We also need to expand beyond college young adults and look at other groups (e.g., non-college workforce).…”

“…Despite the apparent harm-reduction qualities of alcohol protective behavioral strategies (Borden et al, 2011;LaBrie et al, 2010;Martens et al, 2005Martens et al, , 2007Pearson, 2013) and the early successes of targeting these in interventions (Kenney et al, 2014), research has noted methodological concerns about how the alcohol protective behavioral strategies measures are treated in study designs. These concerns are thought to limit a full understanding of how the behaviors function to protect oneself from harm.…”

“…Discussing the use of protective strategies, which are behaviors that one engages in to limit potential consequences if they choose to use substances (e.g., avoiding high-risk drinking activities like drinking games, monitoring how much one is drinking), is one important component of these approaches. For example, a growing empirical body of research has investigated the use of protective behavioral strategies for alcohol use, including scales for assessing the behaviors (Martens et al, 2005(Martens et al, , 2007 and interventions centered around teaching and reinforcing the use of these strategies while drinking (Kenney et al, 2014). Engagement in these behaviors by drinkers has been found to be associated with less frequent consequences and fewer heavy drinking episodes (Borden et al, 2011;LaBrie et al, 2010;Pearson, 2013).…”

“…Items that were rated with means of 3.0 or higher across the five authors were retained, generating a list of 50 items for inclusion in the testing of the scale with young adult marijuana users. Based on wording from similar protective strategies scales for alcohol use (Martens et al, 2005(Martens et al, , 2007, we chose a response style from 1 (never) to 6 (always) and asked participants to "Please indicate the degree to which you engage in the following behaviors when using marijuana/cannabis. "…”