Examining the Distinction and Concordance between Implicit Measures of Alcohol Expectancies: Toward Agreement on Their Meaning and Use

• Main Author: Below, Maureen C
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2007
• Subjects: Expectancy; Memory; Indirect; Drinking patterns; Cognition; American Studies; Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/625; https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1624&context=etd

Alcohol expectancies have traditionally been measured with explicit self-report questionnaires, but in recent years implicit measures have also been used to explore the tenets of expectancy theory. The basic psychometric properties of reliability and validity have not been established for most implicit tasks, and the convergent validity of different implicit measures has not been explored. Despite these shortcomings, many researchers continue to treat implicit tasks as reliable and valid assessment tools. To address reliability and validity of implicit measures, 218 undergraduate women and men were recruited from the University of South Florida to examine the psychometric properties of and concordance between two previously established implicit measures, Free Associates(FA) and a Primed Recall (PR) task. The FA task was replicated, demonstrating high concordance between FA responses and explicit measures and drinking. The PR task did not show a drinker-type effect as was previously reported. Though the relationship between the tasks could not be examined, an exploration of practice and contamination effects offers insight into how performance in similar comparison studies may be affected.