Relationships among self-report assessments of craving in binge-drinking university students

To assess the relationships among self-report craving questionnaires, and between craving and alcohol consumption, we administered four previously published measures of craving (Alcohol Urge Questionnaire, Obsessive-Compulsive Drinking Scale, Penn Alcohol Craving Scale, Temptation-Restraint Inventory), five single-item Visual Analog Scales (need, urge, craving, desire, compulsion), and measures of alcohol consumption and drinking consequences to 112 university students attending a large, public state university who reported at least two binge-drinking episodes (5+ drinks in a row by men; 4+ drinks in a row by women) in the previous 30 days. The associations among the multi-item self-report measures of craving were often larger for men than women, but the coefficients were typically statistically significant and meaningful regardless of gender, indicating good convergent validity despite differences in phrasing of items, response formats, and time periods over which craving was assessed. Generally smaller correlations among the VAS items indicated that these five terms were not inter-changeable among themselves (nor were they inter-changeable with scores on the multi-item questionnaires). Similarly to investigations using clinical samples, regression analyses revealed that recent drinking by binge-drinking students was associated with certain measures of self-reported craving.