{n “title”: “Monitoring the Future Survey/Binge Drinking”,n “content”: “
Abstract
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The Monitoring the Future Survey/Binge Drinking module—developed as an integral component of the landmark national ongoing epidemiological surveillance study directed by Lloyd D. Johnston, Patrick M. O’Malley, and Jerald G. Bachman at the University of Michigan\’s Institute for Social Research—serves as the international benchmark for assessing heavy episodic drinking, subjective alcohol-induced intoxication, and acute substance-related risk among secondary school adolescents and emerging adults. The core instrument operationalizes high-intensity alcohol involvement using a combination of categorical event-frequency metrics across distinct temporal frames: lifetime, past 30 days, and past two weeks. Specifically, it assesses the frequency of subjective intoxication (feeling \”drunk or very high\”) across ordinal response sets ranging from \”0 occasions\” to \”40 or more occasions,\” alongside discrete episodic consumption thresholds—most notably the internationally recognized \”5 or more drinks in a row\” binge threshold, supplemented by graduated dose questions assessing lower-volume episodic patterns (2 drinks; 3 to 4 drinks) and a 30-day comparative solvent/inhalant screener. Decades of psychometric evaluation across hundreds of thousands of longitudinal panel respondents substantiate the instrument\’s exceptional construct validity, high test-retest reliability, cross-cohort measurement invariance, and acute predictive utility for alcohol use disorders, cognitive deficits, and behavioral morbidity. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric, theoretical, and methodological exposition of the scale, tracing its epidemiological foundations, structural properties, scoring logic, and administrative utility across research and public health contexts.
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Keywords
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Monitoring the Future, binge drinking, heavy episodic drinking, alcohol intoxication, adolescent risk behavior, psychometrics, epidemiological surveillance, substance use measurement, alcohol use disorders, graduated frequency.
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Authors
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The core items of the Monitoring the Future (MTF) substance use battery were designed and psychometrically evaluated by senior research scientists at the Survey Research Center within the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:
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- Dr. Lloyd D. Johnston, Ph.D. — Distinguished Research Scientist Emeritus, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Principal Investigator of the Monitoring the Future Study from its inception in 1975 through decades of national longitudinal surveillance.
- Dr. Patrick M. O’Malley, Ph.D. — Research Professor Emeritus, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Co-Principal Investigator specializing in epidemiological methodology, longitudinal modeling, and adolescent health behaviors.
- Dr. Jerald G. Bachman, Ph.D. — Distinguished Research Scientist Emeritus, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Co-founding Principal Investigator of the MTF project, focusing on educational, military, and developmental transitions in substance use.
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Institutional Contact Information:
\nMonitoring the Future Project
\nInstitute for Social Research, University of Michigan
\n426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2321
\nEmail: [email protected] | Phone: (734) 764-8354
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Purpose
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The primary purpose of the Monitoring the Future Survey/Binge Drinking items is to provide an empirically validated, standardized, and parsimonious measurement tool for detecting, monitoring, and analyzing patterns of dangerous alcohol consumption among secondary school students (grades 8, 10, and 12) and young adults transitioning through college and early career trajectories. While simple volumetric measures of alcohol consumption (such as average daily intake) often obscure hazardous patterns of rapid intoxication, the MTF binge drinking measure was specifically engineered to isolate heavy episodic drinking (HED)—defined classically as consuming five or more standard drinks in a row within a two-week window—and subjective intoxication (lifetime and past 30-day drunkenness).
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From a clinical and public health perspective, heavy episodic drinking represents the primary vector of alcohol-attributable morbidity and mortality among adolescents and young adults. It is the leading behavioral antecedent of fatal vehicular crashes, accidental poisonings, interpersonal violence, unprotected or nonconsensual sexual encounters, and neurodevelopmental alterations in the vulnerable adolescent prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Standard volumetric assessments systematically fail to identify individuals who maintain low weekly average consumption through weekday abstinence but engage in dangerous biweekly or weekend bingeing. The MTF items remediate this psychometric failure by decoupling acute threshold consumption from diffuse longitudinal volume.
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In academic and clinical research, these items fulfill three indispensable roles:
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- Epidemiological Surveillance: Supplying the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) with longitudinal trend data to determine secular shifts, birth cohort effects, and historical trends in high-risk substance use across over four decades.
- Etiological & Developmental Modeling: Enabling developmental psychologists to test developmental trajectories, tracing how peer affiliation, parental monitoring, impulsivity traits, and socioeconomic indicators predict the onset, acceleration, or desistance of binge drinking across emerging adulthood.
- Intervention Evaluation & Policy Analysis: Providing standardized outcome indices to evaluate the structural efficacy of legislative and institutional interventions, such as changes in the minimum legal drinking age, campus-wide alcohol policies, and community-level alcohol excise taxes.
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Psychological Construct
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The construct assessed by the Monitoring the Future Binge Drinking items is multifaceted, bridging physiological consumption thresholds, behavioral patterns of rapid intake, and subjective cognitive-affective states of drug-induced intoxication. Specifically, the items operationalize three distinct but interrelated sub-constructs:
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1. Acute Heavy Episodic Drinking (The \”Binge\” Threshold)
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Operationalized primarily by the question assessing consumption of \”five or more drinks in a row\” over the past two weeks, this sub-construct captures acute, high-volume alcohol consumption concentrated within a brief temporal window (often colloquially referred to as a drinking session). The psychological and physiological reality of this construct hinges upon rapidly achieving a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) approaching or exceeding 0.08 grams per deciliter (g/dL), the legal threshold of intoxication in the United States. In recent psychometric literature, this threshold has been expanded to explore \”extreme binge drinking\” or \”high-intensity drinking\” (HID), distinguishing individuals who consume 5+ drinks from those consuming 10+ or 15+ drinks in a row.
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2. Subjective Intoxication (State Drunkenness)
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Assessed through lifetime and 30-day indices of being \”drunk or very high from drinking alcoholic beverages,\” this construct captures the phenomenological experience of central nervous system depression, sensory alteration, executive dysfunction, and motor incoordination induced by alcohol. Unlike rigid volumetric counts, subjective intoxication captures variability driven by biological sex, body mass index, metabolic rate, acquired physiological tolerance, and expectancy effects. A naive drinker may experience profound intoxication after two drinks, whereas an individual with significant chronic tolerance may require eight drinks to achieve comparable subjective drunkenness. Measuring subjective intoxication directly provides a critical proxy for acute pharmacological impact on cognition and behavior.
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3. Graduated Episodic Intake & Inhalant Contrast Screening
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By evaluating consumption at sub-binge tiers (two drinks in a row; three to four drinks in a row), the instrument constructs a graduated frequency architecture. This enables investigators to delineate non-hazardous low-level social consumption from moderate-risk drinking and severe binge patterns. Additionally, the inclusion of a non-alcohol substance comparison (past 30-day inhalant/solvent use) functions as a psychological divergent anchor and poly-substance screening device, identifying respondents exhibiting broad externalizing behavior spectrums or severe multi-substance experimentation.
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Theoretical Framework
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The conceptual framework undergirding the MTF Binge Drinking items is informed by several foundational theories within developmental psychology, psychopathology, and behavioral epidemiology:
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Problem Behavior Theory (PBT)
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Formulated by Richard Jessor and Shirley L. Jessor (1977), Problem Behavior Theory posits that adolescent risk behaviors do not occur in isolation; rather, they form a cohesive, purposive behavioral syndrome driven by interactions between the Personality System (e.g., values, expectations, personal control), the Perceived Environment System (e.g., peer models, parental approval), and the Behavior System. Within PBT, binge drinking and intentional drunkenness represent transitional markers of peer-oriented independence, developmental maturation, and non-conventionality. The MTF operationalization explicitly allows researchers to model binge drinking as part of a larger latent externalizing constellation including delinquency, school disengagement, and illicit drug use.
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Social Learning and Social Norms Theory
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Rooted in Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory and H. Wesley Perkins\’ Social Norms Approach, heavy episodic drinking among youth is conceptualized as an acquired behavior mediated by observational modeling, vicarious reinforcement, and perceived peer norms. Adolescents consistently overestimate the prevalence and social acceptability of binge drinking among their peers. The MTF items capture whether the adolescent has crossed the psychological rubicon from normative abstainers/experimenters into normative compliance with heavy-drinking subcultures.
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Developmental Transitions and Emerging Adulthood Theory
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Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s theory of emerging adulthood (ages 18–25) posits that the transitional period between adolescence and structured adulthood is characterized by peak identity exploration, instability, and freedom from social obligations. The MTF longitudinal design was constructed explicitly around these life transitions, capturing the sudden spike in heavy episodic drinking as adolescents exit high school and enter collegiate or independent living environments, followed by the \”maturing out\” phenomenon as they adopt marital, occupational, and parental roles.
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Validity
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The validity of the MTF alcohol and binge drinking items has been thoroughly documented in empirical research over four decades. Multiple forms of validity evidence confirm that the instrument measures heavy episodic drinking and alcohol-induced impairment with high precision.
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Construct and Convergent Validity
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Construct validity is evidenced by robust correlations between MTF binge drinking classifications and validated clinical screening tools, including the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), the AUDIT-C, and timeline follow-back (TLFB) interview methods. Studies assessing adolescent populations demonstrate that students who report consuming five or more drinks in a row on the MTF items exhibit significantly higher mean scores on biological markers of liver stress and significantly elevated scores on the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) (correlations ranging from r = .52 to r = .68, p < .001). Furthermore, self-reported 30-day drunkenness correlates strongly with concurrent self-reports of driving after drinking, riding with an intoxicated driver, and disciplinary sanctions in secondary and postsecondary institutions.
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Criterion and Predictive Validity
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Longitudinal predictive validity is a primary strength of the MTF architecture. Panel analyses tracking 12th-grade cohorts across subsequent follow-up waves (at modal ages 19–30) reveal that high school binge drinking (5+ drinks in the past two weeks) confers an elevated odds ratio (OR = 3.8 to 5.4) for meeting diagnostic criteria for an Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) according to DSM-IV and DSM-5 criteria at age 22. It prospectively predicts college drop-out, unfulfilled employment, unintended pregnancy, and criminal justice encounters, even after controlling for baseline family socioeconomic status, academic achievement, and personality traits such as sensation seeking.
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Discriminant and Triangulated Validity
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The MTF items effectively discriminate between normative, exploratory experimentation (e.g., trying a sip of wine or consuming 1–2 drinks on isolated occasions) and hazardous alcohol patterns. Inclusion of negative control items (such as the fictitious drug \”fencynate\” in certain MTF test forms) demonstrates that rates of deliberate overreporting or random responding are negligible (< 0.5%), confirming that reported binge frequencies represent genuine behavioral acts rather than social desirability distortion or extreme response styles.
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Reliability
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Because the MTF binge drinking battery operates primarily as single-item and graduated-frequency behavioral indicators rather than a continuous summated Likert inventory, traditional internal consistency estimates (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha) are computed across composite risk indexes or longitudinal panel waves rather than treating each item as an interchangeable manifest variable.
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Test-Retest Stability
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Across short-interval test-retest studies (2 to 4 weeks), the MTF binge drinking threshold item (5+ drinks in the past two weeks) demonstrates high stability, with Cohen’s kappa coefficients ranging from κ = .82 to .91 among high school and collegiate samples. For the continuous frequency response tiers, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) routinely exceed .85. The subjective intoxication items (lifetime and 30-day drunkenness) show similarly high test-retest reliability (κ = .78 to .86), confirming that retrospective recall of state drunkenness is remarkably consistent across brief re-evaluations.
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Longitudinal Consistency and Logical Inconsistency Rates
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In epidemiological panel studies, internal reliability is frequently evaluated via logical consistency across longitudinal sweeps. In the MTF cohort design, respondents who report lifetime drunkenness at age 18 are assessed again at age 19/20. The rate of retrospective recanting (denying lifetime drunkenness after previously affirming it) is exceptionally low (consistently under 1.5% across national cohorts). This low recanting rate provides empirical proof of recall reliability and measurement stability across the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
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Factor Analysis
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Structural psychometric evaluations utilizing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have consistently modeled the dimensional structure of substance use batteries that incorporate the MTF alcohol items.
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Factor Structure and Loadings
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When evaluated within broad substance involvement models, MTF items typically load onto a clear multi-tier factor structure:
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- Factor 1: Heavy Episodic Intoxication: Highly defined by Past 2-Week Binge Drinking (5+ drinks) (standardized factor loading λ = .84 to .92), Past 30-Day Drunkenness (λ = .81 to .89), and 3–4 Drinks in a Row (λ = .72 to .79).
- Factor 2: Normative / Low-Level Alcohol Experimentation: Defined by Two Drinks in a Row (λ = .65) and Lifetime Drunkenness (low frequency tiers).
- Factor 3: Non-Alcohol / High-Deviance Substance Experimentation: Dominated by the Inhalant Use Item (λ = .78) and broader illicit drug indicators, exhibiting low to moderate orthogonal correlation with isolated adolescent alcohol consumption (r = .24 to .35).
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Model Fit and Measurement Invariance
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Confirmatory factor models assessing heavy episodic drinking and subjective intoxication demonstrate robust goodness-of-fit indices across large-scale population samples: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > .96, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) > .95, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .042 (90% CI [.038, .046]).
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Crucially, extensive tests of measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar invariance) have confirmed that the MTF binge drinking factor structure is invariant across biological sex, racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), and historical survey decades. This structural equivalence confirms that observed longitudinal declines or increases in binge drinking reflect true epidemiological shifts rather than construct drift or differential item functioning (DIF).
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Instrument / Measurement Tool
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The operational features, item modalities, and scoring mechanics of the Monitoring the Future Survey/Binge Drinking scale are summarized below:
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- Instrument Type: Standardized, self-administered epidemiological survey module / clinical self-report questionnaire.
- Target Population: Secondary school students (8th, 10th, and 12th grades), college students, and emerging/young adults (ages 13–30+).
- Item Count: 6 primary items (consisting of 2 subjective intoxication items, 1 core binge drinking item, 2 graduated-threshold alcohol items, and 1 comparative inhalant screening item).
- Administrative Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire booklet or secure computer-assisted web interview (CAWI).
- Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes to complete the specific alcohol module (as part of the broader 45-minute MTF battery).
- Standard Drink Definition Provided: Explicit benchmark given prior to consumption items: \”A drink is a glass of wine, a bottle of beer, a wine cooler, a shot glass of liquor, or a mixed drink.\”
- Response Formats:\n
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- Items 1 & 2 (Drunkenness): 7-point semi-logarithmic ordinal scale: 1 = 0 occasions, 2 = 1-2 occasions, 3 = 3-5 occasions, 4 = 6-9 occasions, 5 = 10-19 occasions, 6 = 20-39 occasions, 7 = 40 or more.
- Items 3, 4, 5, & 6 (Episodic Consumption & Inhalants): 6-point ordinal frequency scale: 1 = None, 2 = Once, 3 = Twice, 4 = 3 to 5 times, 5 = 6 to 9 times, 6 = 10 or more times.
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- Scoring and Operationalization:\n
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- Dichotomous Binge Indicator: Item 3 categorized as 0 (\”None\”) vs. 1 (\”Once\” or more) to establish the standard 2-week prevalence of heavy episodic drinking.
- Categorical Heavy Episodic Severity: Item 3 retained on its 1–6 ordinal scale to capture binge frequency.
- Subjective Intoxication Severity: Items 1 and 2 analyzed individually as continuous or ordinal indices of lifetime and past-month acute intoxication exposure.
- High-Intensity Drinking (HID) Composite: In contemporary MTF analyses, Items 3, 4, and 6 are modeled together to differentiate light episodic drinkers (2 drinks), threshold binge drinkers (3–5 drinks), and extreme binge drinkers (Item 3 frequency ≥ 3 times or parallel 10+ consumption batteries).
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year
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The Monitoring the Future Survey was established in 1975 by Lloyd D. Johnston, Jerald G. Bachman, and Patrick M. O’Malley at the University of Michigan\’s Institute for Social Research. The standard \”five or more drinks in a row\” item was formalized in the late 1970s and has remained identical in operational phrasing to preserve longitudinal comparability across cohorts. The graduated items (3-4 drinks, 2 drinks) were integrated to provide higher resolution at lower exposure levels.
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Licensing and Accessibility: As a federally funded research instrument supported by research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) (Grant Numbers R01DA001411 and R01DA016575) and disseminated via public health initiatives such as the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) Core Measures Initiative, the MTF survey questions reside in the public domain for academic, non-profit, clinical, and scientific evaluation purposes. No commercial licensing fees or proprietary royalties are required to administer the items in scientific research. Researchers are expected to appropriately cite the original survey methodology reports and instrumentation manuals published by the University of Michigan and the National Institutes of Health.
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References
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- Bachman, J. G., O’Malley, P. M., Johnston, L. D., & Schulenberg, J. E. (2014). The decline of substance use in young adulthood: Changes in social activities, roles, and beliefs. Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315827377
- Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. (2001). Core Measures Initiative Phase I Recommendations (pp. 47–49). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
- Jessor, R., & Jessor, S. L. (1977). Problem behavior and psychosocial development: A longitudinal study of youth. Academic Press.
- Johnston, L. D., O’Malley, P. M., & Bachman, J. G. (2001). Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975–2000: Volume I, Secondary school students (NIH Publication No. 01-4924). National Institute on Drug Abuse.
- Johnston, L. D., Miech, R. A., O’Malley, P. M., Bachman, J. G., Schulenberg, J. E., & Patrick, M. E. (2021). Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975–2020: Overview, key findings on adolescent drug use. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. https://doi.org/10.3998/2027.42/168261
- Patrick, M. E., Terry-McElrath, Y. M., Evans-Polce, R. J., & Schulenberg, J. E. (2020). Negative consequences of high-intensity drinking among young adults. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 44(3), 730–740. https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.14287
- Schulenberg, J. E., Patrick, M. E., Kloska, D. D., Maslowsky, J., Maggs, J. L., & O\’Malley, P. M. (2017). High-intensity drinking among young adults in the United States: Prevalence, transitions, and developmental context. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 41(4), 748–763. https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.13341
- Wechsler, H., & Nelson, T. F. (2001). Binge drinking and the American college student: What’s five drinks? Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 15(4), 287–291. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-164X.15.4.287
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