Utility of the Brief Young Adult Alcohol Consequences Questionnaire-Drinking Game (B-YAACQ-DG) scale in screening hazardous alcohol use among university student drinking gamers in the United States

Background: Many young adults who are enrolled in a university play drinking games (DG), a risky drinking practice that is known to facilitate heavy alcohol consumption. DG participation is associated with increased risk for harm and as such, identifying university students at risk for experiencing DG harms is key. Standardized instruments designed to assess DG behavior and related outcomes are limited by having no established cutoffs to identify those individuals who play DG who are at risk for hazardous alcohol use. In the present study, we developed a short form of the Brief Young Adult Alcohol Consequences Questionnaire-Drinking Games (B-YAACQ-DG) for use among university student samples based on differential item functioning (DIF)-free items across gender, and established cutoffs indicating hazardous use using receiver-operating characteristic curves with AUDIT scores of 6+ as the reference standard. Method: Students (N = 1,299; ages 18–25; 67.7% women; 71.0% White) from four large public universities in the United States completed a confidential online survey. Results: Although gender-based DIF on several items on the B-YAACQ-DG emerged, there were 16-items that were DIF-free across men and women. An optimal cutoff score for detection of hazardous use for the full version (23-items) of the B-YAACQ-DG was experiencing 4+ DG consequences in the past month, and 3+ consequences for the 16-item DIF-free version. Conclusions: Health practitioners and alcohol researchers can use the B-YAACQ-DG alongside the AUDIT, to identify university students who play DGs that are in need of intervention. The B-YAACQ-DG can also be used to assess specific DG harms experienced among students who play DGs.