Measures of motives for alcohol use provide an important avenue for understanding underlying psychological reasons that drive substance use and predict distinct patterns of use. The Modified Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (MDMQ-R; Grant, Stewart, O’Connor, Blackwell, Conrod, 2007) measures five drinking motives: social, enhancement, conformity, coping-with-anxiety, and coping-with-depression. The MDMQ-R and its predecessors have previously been validated only in non-clinical normative samples.
Therefore, the present study aimed to validate the factor structure and internal consistency of the MDMQ-R in a diverse psychiatric sample of substance-using young adults that presented with either exclusive alcohol use or polysubstance use.
Participants were 255 substance-using young adults (18-26 years; M = 21.17) admitted to the young adult partial hospitalization treatment program at a private psychiatric hospital (62% female; 78% White; 43% students).
A confirmatory factor analysis revealed that items loaded on their respective latent factors (ps < 0.01; loadings between 0.50 and 0.90; reliabilities between 0.80 and 0.94). However, goodness of fit statistics were not reflective of model fit found in Grant et al. (2007) in the overall sample, as well as in alcohol-only and polysubstance-using samples.
Results suggest that the factor structure of the MDMQ-R did not replicate in the present sample. Potential explanations and future directions are discussed in light of the results, including generalizability and clinical utility.

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