Today, the average college student spends about $900 on alcohol every single year. NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS! Look around your college campus. You see alcohol all around. It isn’t an uncommon object. Knowing the prevalence of alcohol on college campuses, Abby L. Goldstein and Gordon L. Flett decided to run a study on college aged students, comparing males and females, determining the motives of alcohol consumption and whether or not this motive would connect to future consequences.
Goldstein and Flett began by hypothesizing, “coping motivated drinkers would be more frequent binge drinkers and would have more alco-hol problems than enhancement motivated and noninternally motivated drinkers, but alcohol use (i.e.,quantity) would not differ between those motivated to drink for mood enhancement versus coping reasons.” Basically, they think that people who drink to forget their problems will binge drink (drinking a lot of alcohol in a short amount of time) more often and have alcohol problems (alcoholism) later in life while those who drink for fun or socially will not have these negative consequences. However, they do think that the amount of alcohol consumed will be the same.
To test their hypothesis, they conducted a study on 230 college freshman, who had all drunk in the past year. They recorded gender, the drinking motives of the students, their personality trait, as well as how much they drank. All of these things were measured using two questionnaires, one given within the first 6 weeks of college and the second 3 months later. Each of the surveys recorded different information.
Looking at their results, Goldstein and Flett saw that gender made a difference in the results. Males drank more to cope, also drinking more in general. Males, also binge drinking more than female, saw a larger consequence of alcohol related problems. (Goldstein and Flett found a high correlation between binge drinking and alcohol related problems.) A higher percent of people said that their reasons for drinking were social and influenced by others, which we see on our college campuses.
From this study, Goldstein and Flett merely found correlations between the motivation for drinking and gender with the extent and reasons for alcohol consumption. They also linked alcohol related problems in the future with binge drinking. Through their experiment, they have shown students how alcohol consumption is affected by certain qualities and how it will affect students in the future. Now, if only their results could find a way to save us students the 900 dollars we spend every year.
No comments:
Post a Comment