Abstract
The article presents a study on Risk of alcohol use disorder among South African university students: The role of drinking motives. A cross-sectional online survey method was employed to collect data from participants during the second term of the academic calendar in 2014. The survey was hosted on Surveymonkey for 18 days. Participants were undergraduate and postgraduate students from a small public university, which has a student population of over 7000. The objectives of this study were threefold: to determine the prevalence RAUD; to explore students drinking motives; and to investigate whether drinking motives predicted RAUD, over and above other risk factors. This study investigated the role of drinking motives in predicting RAUD among students from a population which has been largely underrepresented in the research on drinking motives. The study showed that although students endorse the various drinking motives, the dominant motives differ across contexts. Students in this study endorsed enhancement motives more than social motives. Thus, the study highlights the need for further cross-cultural efforts which include underrepresented regions like Africa and Asia. These larger and representative studies should further evaluate the structure of DMQ-R to ensure better model fit than found in this current study. Despite the noted difference in the rank of drinking motives, this study found that drinking motives predict the highly prevalent RAUD. Thus, clinically, the study supports the provision for AUD screening and assessment, and brief interventions within student healthcare services informed by tenets of the motivational model. The interventions would aid students discover alternative methods of attaining the affective change derived from alcohol use.
