Method

Participants

[Things to include here: overall sample size, gender distribution (raw number and percentage), age range, average and standard deviation].

Materials

Age

Participants were asked to enter their age in whole years.
Gender

Participants were asked ‘What is your gender?” with response options being “Male”, “Female”, “Transgender” and “Other”. Only Males and Females responded to the current survey, therefore making this a dichotomous variable.

Message Frame Conditions – Experimental intervention

Following Collymore and McDermott (2016) participants were randomly allocated to a questionnaire in which one of six photographs occurred accompanied by a unique health persuasion message. There were two fear-loss framed communications, two gain-framed communications and two disgust-loss framed communications. These text and picture combinations can be seen on page 1911 of Collymore and McDermott (2016). Participants were instructed to look at the photo and read the health-related text to its right, then to complete the remainder of the questionnaire.

Drinking Intentions

Intentions to Reduce Current Levels of Alcohol Consumption was assessed by a question asking participants: To what extent do you intend to reduce your current level of alcohol consumption? This question was answered on a 5-point Likert scale, with higher scores indicating greater intentions to reduce alcohol consumption.

Non-drinking Motives

Following Bekman et al. (2011), five items from the Motives for Abstaining from Alcohol Questionnaire (MAAQ: Stritzke & Butt, 2001) were averaged to create an abbreviated measure summarizing key reasons for not drinking. Each item was rated on a 5 point scale (not at all important to extremely important). This measure has demonstrated strong reliability previously ( = .82; Bekman et al., 2011), as well as in the current sample ( = .89).

Procedure

Participants were adults who were invited to participate via social media advertisements. The study was conducted via an online survey platform (Qualtrics). Participants who consented to take part in the study were provided a link to the questionnaire. Participants were then randomly assigned to an experimental condition (message framing conditions) and completed the questionnaire.