Habit, health, and socialising: New insights into diverse motives for consuming alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks

Previous research on motives for drinking has typically focused on alcoholic drinks, sugary drinks, or water, assessing consumption motives with direct assessment methods. Because drinking plays an important role in the long-term maintenance of health, a comprehensive assessment that examines a broad range of drinks and drinking motives could be informative and useful. To provide a comprehensive assessment, we developed and assessed a situated model of drinking behaviour that used drinking motives to indirectly predict the consumption frequency of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. We expected that predictive patterns of drinking motives would vary across drinks as well as across individuals. A UK sample (n = 900) completed an online assessment, evaluating 11 drinks on 34 potential motives. An exploratory factor analysis identified 7 motivational factors that we interpreted as habit, negative consequences, health/functionality, bitterness, sensory enjoyment, ease of regulation, and socialising/positive consequences. These factors explained considerable variance in self-reported drink consumption, both for individual drinks (median = 65%) and for individual participants (median = 95%). Only subtle differences emerged across the predictive patterns for individual drinks, whereas greater variability emerged across individual participants. The results show the value of comprehensively assessing a spectrum of drinking motives across alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks.