Examining the proximal relationship between drinking and smoking behaviors utilizing data collected from a late-night field study

During the 1990s smoking prevalence increased nearly 30% in the college student population. Evidence also suggests a sizable minority (20%) of undergraduate college students report initiating smoking while in college. Several recent studies have demonstrated associations between alcohol use and cigarette smoking in college student samples using cross-sectional survey data which require students to retrospectively recall episodes of drinking and smoking behaviors. Utilizing data collected from an innovative field study designed to measure the proximal relationship between drinking and smoking behaviors, we recruited a convenience sample of 1,189 young adults (M = 19.31, SD = 1.44) between the ages of 18 and 30 (46% female, 30% non-white) who were traveling in 447 groups (M = 3.2 group members, SD = 1.9) in high pedestrian traffic areas near a large university in Southern California to participate in this study. Participants were given a short self-administered survey to complete which included questions about their recent drinking and smoking behaviors. Following completion of the self-administered survey, participants were asked to provide a breath sample which was used to measure breath alcohol concentration (BrAC). We used multilevel linear modeling to test the relationship between smoking status (never smoker, current experimenter, and current smoker) and BrAC. After controlling for participant race and past month heavy episodic drinking, results revealed both current experimenters (M = 0.042, SD = 0.047) and current smokers (M = 0.046, SD = 0.049) were significantly more intoxicated than never smokers (M = 0.025, SD = 0.037), p < 0.05.