Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cummins, Jamie
• Lindgren, Kristen P.
• De Houwer, Jan
• Witkiewitz, Katie

Titel

On the Role of (Implicit) Drinking Self-Identity in Alcohol Use and Problematic Drinking: A Comparison of Five Measures

Ist Teil von

• Psychology of addictive behaviors, 2021-06, Vol.35 (4), p.458-471

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Objective: Implicit and explicit drinking self-identity appear to be useful in predicting alcohol-related outcomes. However, there are several different implicit and explicit measures which can be used to assess drinking self-identity. Some of these implicit measures can also capture relational information (e.g., I am a drinker, I should be a drinker), which might provide unique advantages. Despite the importance of having good measures of drinking self-identity, to date there has been little direct comparison of these measures. Method: This study (N = 358) systematically compared two commonly used measures of drinking self-identity (one implicit and one explicit: the Implicit Association Test [IAT] and the Alcohol Self-Concept Scale [ASCS]) with three relational measures of implicit self-identity (the autobiographical IAT [aIAT], the Relational Responding Task [RRT], and the Propositional Concealed Information Test [pCIT]) on a range of criteria relevant to experimental and clinical alcohol researchers. Results: Overall, we found mixed performances on the implicit measures. Interestingly, the aIAT, which probed should-based drinking identity, performed better than the standard IAT. However, the explicit measure exhibited superior performance to all other measures across all criteria. Conclusions: Our results suggest that researchers who wish to assess drinking-related self-identity and to predict alcohol-related outcomes cross-sectionally should set their focus primarily on the use (and further development) of the ASCS, rather than any of the implicit measures. Future research focusing on the ASCS should seek to investigate the generalizability of our findings to patient populations, and incorporate relational information within that procedure to further improve upon its already-strong utility. Public Significance Statement Psychologists increasingly recognize that the extent to which people self-identify as drinkers can provide unique and meaningful prediction of alcohol-related outcomes. Psychologists typically measure this using both self-report measures and measures of automatic behavior (i.e., implicit measures). In this study, we systematically compare a number of different measures of drinking self-identity based on a number of criteria of relevance to experimental and clinical psychologists.