Successful efforts typically involve a mix of strategies that target individual students, the student body as a whole, and the broader college community. Upon arriving to the lab, a participant and two confederate researchers presented government identification cards to a researcher to verify their age. Participants were randomly assigned to either a social threat or a social acceptance condition. In the social threat condition, the researcher questioned the participant’s student-status as they presented their identification card by saying the phrase ‘Wait, you are a student here, right? Let me see your [student ID] card too.’ In the social acceptance condition, the researcher did not question participants’ student-status. The researcher did not question the confederates’ student-status in either of the conditions.
In this article, we’re taking a closer look at the effects of alcohol on college students. Alcohol use and its related health conditions are known to affect the economy and society through health care costs, lost productivity and the impact of violence and accidents. Through its relationship with educational outcomes, alcohol use may also have an impact on the formation of human capital, economic growth, inequalities and social welfare. Binge drinking had an even greater association with GPA, as weekly binge drinking was linked to a reduction in the GPA of boys (0.25 points) and girls (0.21 points).
Support Groups for Families of Alcoholics
Some students who drink might just be exploring pushing previously-forbidden boundaries while living on their own for the first time. It can be easy to forget that many college students are still teenagers, after all, and just want to fit in with their peers (and sometimes push the status quo). School performance and educational outcomes are key determinants for the formation of human capital and an individual’s future socio-economic status. An OECD report using PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) data showed that improving the cognitive skills of the population can lead to significant economic gains, and that relatively small improvements to labour force skills can have a large impact on the future well-being of a nation (OECD, 2010[21]).
Stressor-related drinking may help identify those who continue to follow problem trajectories. Alcohol use among college students is a prevalent and costly problem, and stressors endemic to the college transition may play a role in alcohol problems among students. In this daily diary study, we found that students were more likely to drink on days with many stressors than days with fewer, how does alcohol affect relationships and the number of drinks they consumed on drinking days was greater with each additional stressor experienced. Our findings suggest stressor-related drinking as a potential risk factor for future alcohol problems and suggest the need for continued research into the effectiveness of stress management training as a prevention strategy for alcohol problems among university students.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
These findings align with previous research showing that coping motivations predict alcohol problems beyond consumption levels (Cooper et al., 1995; Merrill & Read, 2010; Simons et al., 2005). The lack of a significant association between daily stressor-drinking slopes and the AUDIT high-risk status indicator may have resulted from limited power, as only 54 students exceeded the threshold. We also ran additional regression models testing whether daily stressor-drinking slopes predicted alcohol problems at year 4 using the RAPI in place of the AUDIT. Although daily stressor-drinking slopes significantly predicted RAPI-measured alcohol problems at year 4 after adjusting for drinking probabilities on non-stressor days and stressor exposure, the association did not hold when alcohol problem history was added to the model. Thus, caution is warranted when interpreting our findings and replication of our significant results in independent samples is necessary before any causal inferences can be drawn.