Respondents were asked to list activities during the past 6 months “which you spend a lot of time doing, or activities you did, perhaps spending less time, but which were important to you and the way you lived.” For each activity, participants were asked how often others drank during the activity. Participants were allowed to list only the four most important activities. The items had the following response options: 0 = never, 1 = rarely, 2 = sometimes, 3 = often, 4 = usually, and 5 = always. From these data we counted “abstinent activities” as those where others drank never or rarely (codes 0 and 1, both items having to be non-missing). Something was counted as “drinking activities” if others drank often to always (codes 3-5). The number of each type of activity was summed to produce a scale 0-4.
