Young adult dating couples' daily alcohol use: Within-couple associations and implications for relationship satisfaction

Dating relationships during young adulthood provide an important interpersonal context for individuals' health behaviors, including alcohol use. To better understand young adult dating partners' alcohol use associations and implications, this study relied on dyadic data to examine two research questions across the survey and diary methods. For the first question, I explored within-couple linkages between risky drinking. Then I examined within-couple linkages between daily alcoholic drinks and further investigated the potential role of risky drinking as a moderator of the daily links. The results of the correlation showed a positive association between the partners' risky drinking. Multilevel modeling results indicated positive within-couple associations between dating partners' reports of daily drinks, such that on days when males and females reported drinking more than average, their partners also drank more. In addition, females' elevated risky drinking moderated these associations by weakening the positive within-couple links between partners' daily drinks for females. However, males' elevated risky drinking did not moderate these associations for males. With my second research question, I explored the linkages between partners' drinking behavior and relationship satisfaction across the survey and diary methods, and examined the potential role of gender as a moderator of the relations across the two methods. Actor-partner interdependence modeling results showed that females' overall risky drinking was negatively associated with their own relationship satisfaction. In addition, females' dependence symptoms were negatively linked with their own relationship satisfaction and their partners' relationship satisfaction. Furthermore, the multilevel actor-partner interdependence modeling results indicated that, as it related to the within-person effects, on days when females reported consuming a higher-than-average number of drinks, they also reported higher daily relationship satisfaction the day after drinking. Interestingly, as it related to the between-person effects, a higher average number of daily alcoholic drinks consumed across the reporting period was associated with lower relationship satisfaction scores. By using two methods, the implications of the study contribute to the field of alcohol research by offering new insight and a more complete understanding of the effect of alcohol use on relationship-health linkages and the implications of alcohol use for young adult dating couples.