ALCOHOL OUTCOME EXPECTANCIES AND ALCOHOL-USE AND PROBLEMS

Objective: Numerous studies have demonstrated that alcohol outcome exp ectancies are strong correlates of various aspects of alcohol use. How ever, it has been suggested that forced-choice alcohol expectancy item s may not measure the most salient anticipated effects of alcohol for an individual, and thus may create superficial responses. Additionally , research on attitude-behavior consistency has demonstrated that the nature of how an attitude is elicited can lead to attitudes that are m ore or less cognitive. The present study examined the applicability of this aspect of attitude theory to the study of alcohol outcome expect ancies and the utility of self-generated outcome expectancies and subj ective evaluations in predicting alcohol use and problems. Method: In an extension of methodology previously used in attitude research, alco hol-using college students (N = 165, 87 female) generated alcohol expe ctancies in response to two sentence stems designed to elicit ''affect ively'' and ''cognitively'' based alcohol expectancies and made subjec tive evaluations (SE) ratings of each item generated on dimensions of positivity, likelihood and immediacy. Results: While no support was fo und for the generalizability of a particular aspect of attitude theory , several interesting findings emerged. SE ratings were significantly related to measures of alcohol use and problems and, for alcohol use m easures, predicted comparably to a standardized measure of expectancie s. For alcohol dependence symptoms, the number of expectancies generat ed predicted significant unique variance over that accounted for by su bjective evaluations. Conclusions: These results indicate that the she er number of alcohol expectancies accessible to an individual may be a n important correlate of alcohol dependence, independent of subjective evaluations.