Readiness to change and gender: Moderators of the relationship between social desirability and college drinking

This study evaluates the influence of readiness to change (RTC) and gender in the relationship between social desirability (SD) and drinking among college students. Need to avoid social disapproval may lead to underreporting of stigmatized behavior and as such, we expected that SD (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) would negatively associate with drinking. Further, we sought to facilitate understanding of mixed findings in the RTC literature by parsing out effects separately for the precontemplation, contemplation, and action stage, as measured via three validated subscales of the RTC questionnaire (Rollnick et al., 1992). Motivational enhancement efforts tend to focus on increasing RTC among drinkers in the precontemplation and contemplation stage (e.g., Miller & Rollnick, 1992) as these individuals have not yet begun to engage in behavior change, and as such, we will focus on these two subscales. Based on the mixed literature, we hypothesized that RTC would be differentially associated with drinking for precontemplators and contemplators. Moreover, we considered gender and RTC as moderators of the effect of SD on drinking and expected that moderating effects would be different for precontemplators relative to contemplators. Participants included 676 undergraduate students (M age = 22.92, SD = 5.43, 82.44% female). Findings supported predictions. RTC was differentially associated with drinking; for precontemplators, RTC negatively predicted drinking, whereas for contemplators RTC positively predicted drinking, and effects were different for each gender. Hierarchical regressions revealed multiple two- and three-way interactions between RTC, SD, and gender in predicting drinking. Implications of results are discussed.