A COMPARISON OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ALCOHOL EXPECTANCY AND VALUE AND THEIR MULTIPLICATIVE COMPOSITE AS PREDICTORS OF POSTTREATMENT ABSTINENCE SURVIVORSHIP

Within social learning theory, positive alcohol expectancies represent motivation to drink and negative expectancies, motivation to restrain . It is also recognized that a subjective evaluation of expectancies o ught to moderate their impact, although the evidence for this in socia l drinkers is problematic. This paper addresses the speculation that t he moderating effect will be more evident in clinical populations. Thi s study shows that (i) both expectancy and value reliably, independent ly and equally predict clients' abstinence survivorship following disc harge from a treatment programme (and that this is almost entirely con fined to the negative rather than positive terms). When (ii) expectanc y evaluations are processed against expectancy through multiplicative composites (i.e. expectancy X value), their predictive power is only e quivalent to either expectancy or value on its own. However (iii) when the multiplicative composite is assessed following the statistical gu idelines advocated by Evans (1991) (i.e. within the same model as its constituents, expectancy and value) the increase in outcome variance e xplained by its inclusion is negligible and casts doubt upon its use i n alcohol research. This does not appear to apply to value, however, a nd its possible role in treatment is discussed.