The alcohol self-presentation model: using thematic qualitative analysis to elucidate how college students self-present via alcohol-related social media posts

Abstract

Introduction:

Posting and viewing of alcohol-related content to social media is prevalent among college students and is related to problematic drinking. However, the cognitive self-presentation and self-monitoring processes behind users’ alcohol-related content posts to different platforms are largely unknown.

Methods:

Through in-depth, qualitative interviews with college students (n = 15) who drink heavily and post alcohol-related content regularly, we developed the Alcohol Self-Presentation Model.

Results:

Using a multi-step thematic analysis approach, the themes of protectiveness and acquisitiveness emerged; these themes served as the basis of our model. In total, three protectiveness (perceived permanence of the content, privacy and reputation concerns) factors and four acquisitiveness (provocative, impulsive, high-status, and maintaining relevance and connections) factors were derived.

Discussion and Conclusions:

Our model delineated the alcohol self-presentations which allowed participants to demonstrate disparate versions of themselves to certain social media audiences. Our results illuminated that what people identify as being alcohol-related content, and what motivates the individual to post alcohol-related content, are essential to better comprehending how their alcohol-related content uniquely contributes to their drinking. Understanding students’ alcohol self-presentations is important since their alcohol-related content may be putting themselves, and others, at-risk by perpetuating patterns of frequent posting and heavy drinking within the network. Our model may inform future behavioural interventions targeting the reduction of drinking among young people who are active on social media.

Introduction

Young people are major consumers of alcohol and college students are an especially vulnerable subpopulation. Heavy drinking occurs due to the culture of intoxication and wanting to fit in with their peers [1, 2]. Further, students prone to binge drinking are five times more likely to miss classes, contributing to the likelihood of lower academic performance [3].

Posting and viewing of alcohol-related content is highly prevalent among college students [4] and contributes to increased drinking, especially if students perceive their friends as being more approving of drinking [5]. Viewing positively-framed alcohol-related content encourages users to post their own positive alcohol-related content [6], since such content receives more validation [e.g. likes, engagement; 7]. Existing literature has also revealed that posting one’s own alcohol-related content is positively associated with increased drinking and/or binge drinking among college students [8–11]. Even among those who do not post alcohol-related content, viewing others’ alcohol-related content still appears to influence their drinking behaviour and perceived drinking norms [6]. This is problematic because seeing and posting alcohol-related content may lead to cyclical increases in drinking among network members as they engage in drinking to post alcohol-related content.

According to the uses and gratifications theory, people actively search for and engage with media that meets their personal needs [12]. As such, it may be that college students are consciously posting particular alcohol-related content to specific platforms with different features because they are the most likely destinations for receiving fulfilment. For example, one study examined Facebook photo sharing through the lens of this theory and identified gratifications such as attention-seeking and information sharing [13].

Some research has highlighted differences in how various social media platforms operate, specifically, in the context of self-presenting alcohol use [e.g. 7, 14–16]. For example, the ability to capture events in real-time for others, in which the content disappears, is likely why Snapchat has been reported as the primary platform for alcohol-related content that flaunts impulsive or provocative behaviour [7]. But on Instagram, users are encouraged to stylise their pages and upload alcohol-related content that portrays a socially active and high status lifestyle [17]. Meanwhile, on Twitter, users can use hashtags and engage in real-time global conversations about alcohol-related content while maintaining privacy; consequently, many tweets allude to the consequences of drinking such as blacking out [15]. In contrast, because of reputation concerns, Facebook users refrain from posting uninhibited alcohol-related content or alcohol-related content depicting consequences of alcohol use where their family or future employers might see it [18, 19].

According to Goffman’s Self-Presentation Theory, people deliberately self-present in different ways depending on who they are communicating with and their desired outcomes for these interactions [20]. In an online context, social media provides a unique opportunity for users to curate conceptualisations of themselves via posts that they feel might be appealing to specific social network audiences. Whereas face-to-face communication is generally extemporaneous, posting to social media is often communicated through controlled intention, constructed from details that the user deliberately conveys [21, 22].

A closely related concept to Self-Presentation Theory is self-monitoring. According to Snyder [23], self-monitoring involves modifying one’s own behaviours to suit different social situations in the hopes of receiving a desired response; thus, self-monitoring is the goal-oriented, decision-making process which precedes an individual’s self-presentation choice. In our study, we expand on the self-monitoring literature by examining how it operates in the context of viewing and posting alcohol-related content to social media.

The current study

Despite the large body of literature, the research up to now has examined alcohol-related content from a quantitative perspective and focused on the fact that there are differences in how people generally self-present via alcohol-related content on different social media platforms. Yet, the underlying reasons for why people might elect to self-present, oftentimes in dramatically different ways, using alcohol-related content remain unclear. As such, our research takes a qualitative approach in proffering an Alcohol Self-Presentation Model. Specifically, our model proposes that people self-present via alcohol-related content in either acquisitive or protective manners. These concepts were derived from both self-presentation theory [24] and self-monitoring literature [23]. Acquisitiveness is characterised by the assessment of others’ reactions to alcohol-related content posts and altering one’s own posting behaviour to obtain attention and approval, whereas protectiveness aims to self-present in a manner which avoids disapproval from others [24].

Method

Procedure

Participants were recruited from a large, Southern public university in the United States through campus-wide emails and the university’s research portal (i.e. Sona Systems). Respondents completed a 7-minute screening questionnaire administered through the online survey platform, Qualtrics. The inclusion criteria included: being an undergraduate college student between 18-26, not pregnant, with at least one episode of heavy drinking (i.e. 5+ standard drinks for women, 6+ standard drinks for men) in the past month, who also frequently posted alcohol-related content to social media (3+ alcohol-related content posts on average per month over the last three months). The study was conducted between the 2018 Autumn term and 2019 Spring term. We explored Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat based on a previous campus-wide questionnaire, which indicated these four platforms were common for posting alcohol-related content. Although the participants had to meet posting criteria for at least one of the four platforms, we asked them to go through their alcohol-related posts on any of the four platforms they posted to.

Qualifiers were brought into the lab on the university campus as part of a preliminary step to develop a standardised scale assessing students’ drinking and alcohol-related content posted on social media. All participants provided their informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study. During semi-structured interviews, researchers assessed students’ self-presentation of alcohol-related content across the four social media platforms to better understand who they were posting alcohol-related content for, how they were trying to appear, and which platforms they posted alcohol-related content to.

In addition, participants were asked to go through their alcohol-related content posts with a research team member and discuss the context of their archival alcohol-related content posts during the past 3- to 6-months. Participants were also asked to recall how much they drank when they posted alcohol-related content. Interviews lasted on average 1 hour and 45 minutes, and alcohol-related content posts were surveyed for a 6-months interval until saturation (i.e., no additional information was derived from going back through participants’ alcohol-related content posts over a 6-month time interval versus a 3-month time interval) was achieved, at which point only posts from the past 3 months were examined. Following the interviews and a baseline assessment, participants received a $40 Amazon gift card and class credits for participating in the research study.

Participants

Fifteen participants’ (M_age=20.73, SD =1.39) interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The majority identified as female (73.33% female) and the sample was racially diverse (46.67% White Hispanic, 26.67% Asian Non-Hispanic, 13.33% White Non-Hispanic, 6.67% Black/AA Hispanic, 6.67% Other Non-Hispanic).

Snapchat was the platform used by the majority of students, 14 participants (93.33% of sample), to post alcohol-related content. Instagram was the second most popular destination for alcohol-related content, used by 13 of 15 students (86.66% of participants). Six students (40.00%) employed Twitter as a main platform to post alcohol-related content. Only one participant (6.67% of participants) cited regularly posting alcohol-related content to Facebook.

Data analysis method

We used thematic analysis [25] as our guiding framework. Thematic analysis allows for complex yet trustworthy and insightful [26] analysis of qualitative data through the identification, organisation, description, and reporting of themes across participants. Thematic analysis uses five steps: familiarisation with the data, initial code generation within-participant interviews (vertical analysis), searching for themes across participants (horizontal analysis), reviewing themes, and defining and naming the encapsulated phenomena, using an iterative process [25, 26].

Interviews were qualitatively coded by the authors using NVivo and Excel. While reading the transcripts from each participant, researchers vertically coded chunks from each of the interviews into emergent themes. Next, they looked horizontally for strong themes across participants. The four authors independently coded the chunks into what would eventually become the two main aspects of our Alcohol Self-Presentation Theory: protective, which is characterised by efforts to avoid disapproval, and acquisitive, which encompasses efforts to obtain approval [24]. We draw these phenomenological concepts from the existing literature on self-presentation [24] and self-monitoring [23]. After independently coding the chunks into protective and acquisitive, the authors met to discuss the codes. When differences in the protective, acquisitive, vs. other coding emerged, the authors discussed the quotes until consensus was achieved.

For a second coding pass, the authors independently read chunks or quotes that were grouped as protective and acquisitive. While reading the protective chunks, the authors generated subthemes from the quotes. After independently generating subthemes, the authors met to discuss the quotes. Through a series of four meetings, the authors converged on three subthemes for the protective quotes: (i) impermanence; (ii) privacy; and (iii) reputation concerns. While reading the acquisitive chunks, the authors independently generated subthemes from the quotes. Through a series of two meetings, the authors converged on four subthemes for the acquisitive quotes: (i) provocative; (ii) status; (iii) impulsive; and (iv) maintaining relevance and connections.

Throughout the theme and subtheme process, the authors remained vigilant by focusing on the following techniques. First, they asked each other why they thought the quote or chunk fit into the theme or subtheme recommended. Specifically, the authors asked each other which words or phrases in the quote drew them to their conclusion as a credibility check. In addition, the full text of the participant’s interview was regularly referenced to ensure the broader context of the quote or chunk also aligned with the recommended theme or subtheme. Second, authors regularly asked each other what they thought the intention was behind the participant’s wording. While authors were coding the participants’ intentions, they critically examined which parts of the quote or chunk led them to conclude that was the intention. Each of these steps helped ensure the trustworthiness of the themes and subthemes that emerged.

Results

Overview

The proposed model encapsulates how students utilise alcohol-related content to present aspects of their identities, and also examines factors that influence what type(s) of alcohol-related content they will post to which platform. Those who posted alcohol-related content to multiple platforms often depicted the same drinking events in dramatically different ways, which reflected the implicit norms of the distinct platforms. For instance, a student may post a picturesque photo of themselves holding a drink at the start of a party to their wider, public audience on Instagram; however, as the evening progressed, and they became more intoxicated, they might post impulsive, provocative alcohol-related content to select individual(s) via Snapchat.

Two major themes emerged from the interview transcripts. The first theme, protective, involved quotes that expressed aspects of the platform (perceived permanence of the content, privacy) and reasons behind posting (reputation concerns) that were leveraged to avoid social disapproval. The second theme, acquisitive, involved the motive of gaining approval from others through the content of their posts (provocative, impulsive, high-status, maintaining relevance and connections). See Figure 1 for a graphical representation of the model. Each theme and subtheme are discussed below.

Figure 1.

Alcohol Self-Presentation Model graphical representation

Theme 1: Protective

The defining characteristic of protective self-monitoring is the desire to avoid social disapproval. Participants who endorsed this type of self-presentation try to avoid embarrassment and rejection from others. In short, it is presenting alcohol-related content online in a way that conforms to the perceived norms. There were three subthemes related to the overarching theme of protective self-monitoring: impermanence, privacy and reputation concerns.

Subtheme 1: Impermanence

A major motivation for students to share alcohol-related content stems from expectations that their content would remain private through impermanence. Snapchat allows users to directly message specific individuals or groups with the caveat that the alcohol-related content typically disappears after a certain period of time. Furthermore, users are immediately notified when their alcohol-related content has been screenshotted by a particular receiver. The students who were avid Twitter users continually posted content throughout the day; consequently, it can be difficult to find a specific tweet on an active, daily Twitter users’ profile page. Although all their tweets are archived to their Twitter profiles, students perceived the alcohol-related content they posted to be impermanent. As a result, students felt comfortable posting potentially risky alcohol-related content without feeling as though it would result in future consequences. Example quotes are below.

“… I see 20 posts a week of [alcohol-related content] on Snapchat and that’s just because people … they feel a lot less restricted because it’s temporary.” (Female, 19)

“I will put it on my story instead of my [Instagram] newsfeed so it disappears after 24 hours … [other people] they will just post the story of them actually getting drunk [on their stories too].” (Female, 23)

“That’s kind of why it’s like, also, easier to use Twitter, because, like, you put it there and it’s gone.” (Female, 21)

Subtheme 2: Privacy

To avoid social disapproval, many of the users discussed functions within each of the platforms which allowed for more privacy. Twitter users may conceal their true identities; users may communicate freely with others with little to no personally identifying information on their profiles. Hence, students discussed feeling as though the alcohol-related content they posted to Twitter remained private, even though their profiles were public. On Snapchat, because of the expectations their posts would remain private, students described sharing uninhibited alcohol-related content (e.g. sexy drunken selfies), which they would normally not disclose to a wider audience. The latter content was often indicative of students’ heavy intoxication. Students perceived they could communicate with specific like-minded individual(s) or group(s) in an uncensored manner without fear of judgement. Example quotes about Twitter and Snapchat are below.

“[My Twitter profile] It’s not connected to really, like, anything … like I have my name on there, just my first name, but, um, I keep it pretty separate from everything else … Not like I’m hiding or anything, but just, like, uh, I feel kind of [it’s] more, like closed off, even though it’s not like, private.” (Female, 21)

“… sororities have very strict rules about their girls and posting [alcohol-related content] so whatever we have on Snapchat would have gone to our group rather than a public one.” (Female, 19)

“… I find that Snapchat is more private, but also I can be myself on there more and post about stuff, like this [casual alcohol-related content], and not have people I don’t really talk to see it…” (Female, 22)

Subtheme 3: Reputation concerns

Another aspect of the protective theme was describing their thought process regarding reputation concerns. On some platforms (e.g. Instagram), students have the option of posting alcohol-related content to either their main profile, which is more permanent and public, or to their stories, which disappear within 24 hours. Participants deliberately avoided posting more provocative and impulsive alcohol-related content to their main profile page, where it would be more enduring, in order to protect their reputation. Students indicated they primarily posted such alcohol-related content to more select groups of people by utilising the “close friends” option of Instagram stories, which allows users to select exclusive followers whom they wish to display certain stories to. In the quotes below, the participants provide additional context as to how their choices to limit the audience composition or filter their posts to appeal to certain audiences (e.g. family and professional contacts) protect their reputations.

“I don’t post on my regular [Instagram] story, I post it on my private story, because there’s a lot of people that I just don’t trust with seeing the stuff that I do… it would tarnish my reputation.” (Female,18)

“… when I’m, like, posting on Instagram, I’m more likely to post … if it’s alcohol-related, something that makes me look like I have my stuff together …. I’m not gonna post, like, a really bad picture of me, like, laying on the ground or something … it would be more likely to be something like me and my friend with our margarita pictures, like a brunch day or something like that.” (Female, 21)

“From personal experience with my friends, I feel like a lot of them do treat Facebook as, like, the more professional social media platform …” (Female, 21)

“I never post [alcohol-related content] on Facebook because I have a lot of family there, like I have a lot of conservative … family on that.” (Female, 19)

Theme 2: Acquisitive

Defining aspects of theme 2 are the desire to seek attention and approval from others. In particular, it involves gauging the reactions of others in order to maximise the amount of validation received. There were four subthemes in this category: provocative, status, impulsive, and maintaining relevance and connections.

Subtheme 1: Provocative (attention)

When posting alcohol-related content, the desire to gain attention by posting sexually-laced content or by evoking a strong reaction from others was mentioned in several interviews. Whereas some participants expressed regret for having posted this type of material, the posts had the desired effect of garnering attention due to their provocative nature.

“[I’ll post alcohol-related content that’s] sexual. I’m probably tipsy or half naked [on Snapchat] …” (Female, 22)

“[Our group Snapchats when] something really crazy was happening. Like me on the floor, or somebody fighting somebody … or like … the guy who was under the tv stand, things like that they’ll chronicle [when drinking]” (Female, 19)

Subtheme 2: Status

Students indicated they often posted alcohol-related content to social media that postured or flaunted social or economic status (Instagram and Snapchat) and humour (Twitter). These types of alcohol-related content expressed to their wider, generally public audience that they were leading an exciting, enviable lifestyle or building online prestige.

In particular, students seemed to primarily utilise Instagram to promote themselves in the best light. Alcohol was often used as a status symbol. Participants reported using Instagram’s filters to create an enticing visual aesthetic for their photos and videos, which is archetypal for this platform. In fact, two students (13.33%) specifically discussed using alcohol-related content for branding purposes to obtain sponsorships from advertisers on Instagram; hence, these participants sought to broaden their public reach. Below are example quotes discussing status-climbing through posting alcohol-related content.

“…they can flaunt jewellery when they’re drinking, so that they can show they have money [on Instagram].” (Male, 21)

“If you have 1000 or more followers, you can reach out and promote ads on your profile of you holding the item and maybe even get a discount code for your followers and if they purchase something you can get money out of it…If you have a pleasantly looking Instagram, people will usually follow you.” (Female, 22)

“[People like to prove] they’re popular [on Snapchat], that … they constantly go out … that they have a lot of friends.” (Female, 21)

Twitter users, in particular, received the most validation for their sense of humour or their humorous antics. This ranged from retweeting others’ alcohol-related content to trying to go viral by strategically crafting clever or comical alcohol-related content. Example quotes are below.

“I will be more funny on Twitter. I had a post a while back ‘If you ever feel like you’re looking bad one day, remember I took these pics at a club one time thinking I looked good’, with really blurry pictures, that got 34 likes. When you’re being funny on Twitter, I feel like it appeals to people more, especially if its alcohol-related.” (Female, 22)

“Let’s say I’m drinking and I come up with really funny [Twitter] Tweets that—well that I think is funny. I’ll put them in my drafts and like the next day or something, like around 11 or four—between the times of 11 or 4, I’ll Tweet some things to see if it gets attention or not.” (Male, 21)

Subtheme 3: Impulsive

The participants also described posting alcohol-related content without any forethought. In these situations, the participants seemed less concerned about potential negative reactions to their posting behaviour. On Snapchat, these types of impulsive posts were visually driven, whereas on Twitter, posts were primarily text-based chains of thought. The participants chose these platforms to publish their impulsive alcohol-related content posts because they would be displayed to their audiences in real-time and reflected the type of content that participants often saw from other users on the respective platforms.

“I was drunk singing in my car [on Snapchat] … I tried all the beers at work … I missed class ‘cause I drank.” (Female, 22)

“Yeah, [we are hanging around the toilet] because she was, like, I feel sick. And then … she was just very, very gone. We were all like pretty tip—like drunk that night … But yeah this is like one of the very few nights where I took a whole bunch of [alcohol-related content] stuff [and posted to Snapchat] … But this [is us around the toilet]. I just like—direct messaged to … this group chat that we have.” (Female, 18)

“Twitter’s kind of like, a just stream of consciousness. Uh, so if I’m, like, doing something stupid, like, while I’m drinking, I would write about that.” (Female, 21)

Subtheme 4: Maintaining relevance and connections

The largest subtheme was maintaining relevance and connections. Students described posting alcohol-related content to Facebook and Snapchat to maintain connections with specific individuals or groups of people. On Snapchat, the alcohol-related content posts often referenced inside jokes or alcohol-related content that only certain individuals would find interesting. Posts on Facebook typically served as a broader way to keep family and overlapping groups of friends updated on noteworthy events and travel involving alcohol-related content. Students mentioned using Twitter to convey that they were keeping up with the drinking norms of their important peer groups, as well as to generate or retweet alcohol-related content to maintain relevance. As such, the alcohol-related content posts functioned to promote in-group cohesion and keep the connection alive between close others. Overall, across Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter, participants noted that they felt compelled to post alcohol-related content in order to fit in with their peers. Example quotes are below.

“I have a lot of people in my [Facebook] network from dance-related stuff. So people that are just dancing as a job, and have time to like, travel and post stuff about drinking and stuff. But I also have, like, people from different colleges on there who just keep up with updating everybody of what they’re doing.” i

“I’ll post like, all the pictures [from an event, including alcohol-related content pictures, on Facebook] so my family can get the picture that they’re in.” (Female, 22)

“I’ll just post it to my [Snapchat] group story where people will understand the relevant inside joke.” (Male, 20)

“I feel pressured sometimes to post things to keep up with, like, my friends [on Snapchat] … You know, like, posting what you’re doing, and it shows that you’re active, so I feel like I would be pressured to keep up with my active voice on social media.” (Female, 22)

“I would post on like, a night that I was drinking [to Instagram], not so much about the alcohol, but about the people that I was with.” (Female, 21)

“It would have been me tweeting [on Twitter] that I’ll be drunk through the weekend … Because I’m supposed to be going out the whole week so that’s just saying that I’m gonna keep strong the whole week.” (Female, 23)

Discussion

Based on our results, Goffman’s self-presentation theory [20] and self-monitoring theory [23], we propose the Alcohol Self-Presentation Model, which explains the motivations and cognitive self-presentation processes that college students may be employing when cultivating their online identities via alcohol-related content. Overall, participants sought to construct a particular image to acquire attention and validation (acquisitiveness). Additionally, some participants who were concerned about potential negative judgments surrounding their alcohol-related content posts also took specific actions to preserve their image (protectiveness). Moreover, what dictated the types of alcohol-related content presented was the user’s intended audience on each platform.

Some participants were reticent to post alcohol-related content which they perceived presented themselves in a negative light to certain platforms due to protectiveness factors (impermanence, privacy and reputation concerns). Due to the constant stream of new tweets on Twitter, some participants perceived their content to be fleeting, even though this content was archived to their profiles. Some participants also mentioned keeping their Twitter account anonymous (e.g. disconnected from their offline identities). On Snapchat, participants took advantage of privacy features that allow users to post content to a finite group of people, often for a short duration time. Finally, reputation concerns prevented some students from publicly posting uncensored alcohol-related content to social media profiles explicitly tied to their real-life identity or platforms where their family or prospective employers may view it (e.g. Facebook).

Most participants seemed to be driven by acquisitive factors (provocativeness, status, impulsiveness, and maintaining relevance and connections) to post alcohol-related content, ultimately because they sought some form of validation from their audiences. A couple of participants mentioned posting provocative alcohol-related content to their Snapchat featuring sexual content to draw attention from specific audience members. Several others fashioned their alcohol-related content posts to Instagram and Snapchat to appear affluent and high in popularity, with a few directly angling their content on Instagram – specifically, toward branding themselves in hopes of gaining sponsorships. Similarly, Twitter users sought social status through humorous alcohol-related content posts with the objective of going viral. A few participants recalled posting impulsive, “in the moment” content to Twitter and Snapchat to seize the attention of others. All four of the social media platforms were utilised to maintain relevance within participants’ networks and to keep up connections with particular groups of people such as family, friends, and professional contacts.

Overall, through our research, we also discovered important considerations for future researchers. For instance, analysing a person’s posts to just one social media platform will not provide the full picture of an individual’s drinking behaviours, nor will it uncover what that individual seeks to accomplish by posting alcohol-related content. If an individual only posts alcohol-related content to Facebook in the form of memes and photos that their family would approve of, researchers might conclude that this individual does not engage in excessive drinking, nor are they fixated on receiving attention. But if that same individual is posting a flood of uncensored, stream-of-consciousness tweets – which may be indicative of heavy intoxication – to Twitter every weekend, by analysing this platform, researchers would come to a far different conclusion regarding this individual’s drinking habits and alcohol-related content posting intentions. Indeed, we found that most participants did present themselves in substantially different ways across platforms. Furthermore, our research revealed that many of the posts which participants self-identified as alcohol-related content may not have been identified by researchers without the context behind the posts. Although previous research has unearthed that people post differently framed alcohol-related content depending on the platform [11], we found through our interviews that it is crucial to examine how an individual presents themselves across multiple social media platforms with the participant to get a comprehensive understanding of their alcohol-related content posting behaviour and how it relates to their drinking.

Future directions and limitations

Through this line of research, with the qualitative interviews and creation of a measure to determine how much participants post and drink, we discovered that young peoples’ alcohol-related content posts serve as a digital diary of their drinking events. Seeing as our participants were often surprised by how much they had actually drank after reviewing their alcohol-related content posts, these digital diaries may be useful in helping young people to recall their drinking and draw attention to problematic drinking behaviours. Thus, our model may be an effective tool to formulate behavioural interventions that focus on making young people more cognisant of how their alcohol-related content posts relate to their drinking. For instance, people who are highly acquisitive may be seeking validation from their peers through posting alcohol-related content. These individuals may be deliberately constructing an image surrounding alcohol-related content that they believe will gain them status and popularity. This, in turn, might influence them to drink more heavily to constantly create posts that they perceive their peers would find appealing. In fact, one of the participants in our study mentioned feeling pressured to go out drinking to maintain her online presence. Moreover, understanding the motivations underlying their alcohol-related content may highlight how their reliance on fleeting external validation may be negatively impacting their mental and physical wellbeing. From there, clinicians might work with young people to redirect these validation-seeking behaviours, build meaningful connections with others that are not reliant on alcohol, and potentially reduce problematic drinking.

A limitation of our study is that we only interviewed college students, so themes generated may be influenced by college drinking culture. Additionally, our data was based on a sample from a single American university, so the results may not be generalisable to young people from other countries due to differences in drinking cultures and drinking age restrictions. Furthermore, given that 73% of our sample was female, the model may not fully encapsulate how young men self-present via alcohol-related content. Another limitation is that our sample primarily (66%; 10/15) consisted of participants who were of legal drinking age in the US (i.e. most were 21 or over), so our model may not be representative of adolescents or underage drinkers. Even though students were assured that their identities would remain confidential, it is possible that underage drinkers were more hesitant to share their alcohol-related content. Also, we only recruited heavier drinkers for this study given that this was a preliminary step to constructing a measure assessing peoples’ alcohol-related content posting behaviour and drinking. Future studies might explore whether our Alcohol Self-Presentation Model applies to other populations, such as young people from other countries, young men, underage drinkers and lighter drinkers. Finally, we were unable to encompass all social media platforms that students are currently posting to given how rapidly new platforms emerge. However, we believe that our model still provides a good general framework irrespective of whether young people migrate to posting alcohol-related content to other emerging platforms.

Conclusions

Our model elucidates the cognitive self-monitoring processes behind young peoples’ decisions to self-present by posting different types of alcohol-related content to social media. These alcohol-related self-presentations enabled participants to display different aspects of themselves to specific social media audiences; through deliberate choices concerning their alcohol-related content posting, students put forward versions of themselves that also aligned with the implicit social norms of each platform. Researchers should include the individual in the conversations surrounding their alcohol-related content posts to more than one social media platform to gain a more comprehensive picture of: what the participant self-identifies as alcohol-related content (since this may differ from what the researcher categorises as alcohol-related content), and what motivates the participant to post alcohol-related content. These two components will better delineate how alcohol-related content uniquely impacts their alcohol use. Given that alcohol-related content may be distinctly contributing to cyclical increases in drinking and posting within students’ social media networks, it is essential that researchers understand how these cyclical patterns emerge in order to formulate more effective behavioural interventions.