Development and psychometric assessment of the Alcohol Expec-tancy Questionnaire for Argentinean Adolescents (CEA-A)

Abstract

A new measure of positive and negative alcohol expectancies in adolescents was developed and validated. Study 1: 212 adolescents an-swered a structured open format question to gather information regarding effects they anticipate from their alcohol consumption. The pool of obtained items was analyzed by a group of three experts according to the following criteria: item correspondence with two different theoretical models and item semantic correctness. According with the evaluation of the agreement between judges, a set of 70 items was obtained. Study 2: 275 adolescents answered the Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire -Adolescent form (CEA-A). Internal structure was analyzed through the use of exploratory factor analysis. A principal component analysis with oblimin rotation yielded a six factor structure. The measure was found to demonstrate good internal consistency for the global and five scales and moderate internal consistency for the remaining scale. These results indicate that CEA-A is a valid and reliable measure to assess alcohol expectancies in Argentinean adolescents.