Questions have been raised concerning the reliability and validity of self-report measures of substance abuse behaviors and beliefs. The proposed exploratory research will examine whether non self-report attitude assessment techniques, developed by social and cognitive psychologists, might provide an alternative assessment tool for the measurement of alcohol-related attitudes. These techniques measure the extent to which attitudes are automatically activated upon the presentation of cues related to an attitude object. The study will address the following three aims: (1) To determine the adaptability and applicability of experimental attitude measurement techniques to the assessment of alcohol-related attitudes and expectancies. (2) To compare different experimental approaches to eliciting (priming) and to measuring automatic attitudes and expectancies. (3) To determine whether these experimental techniques accurately and effectively capture alcohol-related attitudes and expectancies by examining whether experimental outcome measures are: (a) associated with individual alcohol use patterns; (b) associated with prior exposure to parental alcohol use; and more closely associated with use patterns and prior exposure than self-reported alcohol-related attitude and expectancy measures. If these experimental procedures can be applied effectively to the assessment of alcohol-related attitudes and expectancies, there would be far-reaching consequences for alcohol research, prevention, and treatment. These procedures can replace the more traditional self-report measures, for which reliability and accuracy are often compromised by respondents' self-presentation and social desirability concerns, as well as by their generally inadequacy at accurately assessing and conveying sensitive attitudes. These new attitude measurement techniques could then serve not only as powerful research tools, but also as powerful tools for assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of intervention programs aimed at modifying alcohol attitudes and expectancies. The findings could also have important implications for understanding and resisting the strong impact of alcohol industry marketing on people's automatic evaluations of and affective reactions to alcohol advertisements. The study will be conducted on college students who have a range of alcohol use experience. After obtaining informed consent, 300 participants will be asked to complete a questionnaire and then 150 of them will be contacted to take part in a series of experiments several weeks later. During the experimental session, participants will complete two brief questionnaires, assessing their affect, arousal, and alcohol-related attitudes, expectancies, and behavioral intentions. Then, they will take part in three within-subject experiments, in which they will be presented with alcohol-related and unrelated visual and verbal primes on a computer screen and respond in ways that will unobtrusively measure the automaticity of their attitudes, affect, and expectancies. The nature of their automatic attitudes, affect, and expectancies are expected to be influenced by their own prior experiences with alcohol. Analyses will compare the effectiveness of these implicit measurement techniques to the more traditional self-report (explicit) measurement techniques.
