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

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to determine the effect of the impulsivity as well as the causes of drinking alcohol in college. We selected a non-probabilistic sample of 36 students of a private college, 47.1% were male and 52.9 female, with an age range of 17-27 years and a mean of 20.66 years. To measure the alcohol consumption, we used an adapted version of the Drinking Motives Questionnaire, which consists of three dimensions: coping reasons, social reasons and conformity reasons. Impulsivity was evaluated with the adapted versions of the Plutchik scale consisting of 15 items in Likert scale with four response options ranging from never to always. These results showed that 93.6% of the participants reported the consumption of alcohol sometime in their lives. As for the effect of the causes for drinking and the impulsivity of the consumption in college students, the results showed that the three dimensions to drink explained 39% of the variance in the alcohol consumption among young people, however, impulsivity did not enter as a predictor variable.