Karen Jennison (2004) claims that alcohol consumption patterns in college have a significant influence on a person’s future life pattern. Here, the author provides both short term and long-term effects by stating that, heavy drinkers in college are likely to experience alcohol-related problems in college, unlike their non-drinking counterparts.
In addition, those who drink a lot in college are more likely to experience long-term life problems such as college dropout, poor performance in academic work, and limited opportunities in the labor market. Moreover, the author tries to establish whether people who engage in binge drinking in college tend to continue with the same habit after completing college and even in later years of their life.
This is in light of suggestions by some researchers that those who drink heavily in college tend to change their drinking patterns after completing college and becoming moderate or non-drinkers (Jennison, 2004). This study has also sought to establish linkages between college drinking, occupation, labor market, and alcohol abuse or dependence later in life.
The hypothesis of the study is that alcohol consumption in college predisposes risk factors or alcohol-related problems that are likely to continue later in life. Here, Jennison (2004) hypothesizes that alcohol consumption patterns ten years after college would be dependent on the alcohol consumption patterns exhibited in college, including associated risk factors such as college dropout, education attainment, marriage, and career path.
The independent variable in this study is the degree of alcohol consumption in college and its associated short-term effects on academic performance, marriage, and career. The independent variable is also more refined to include gender, race, and age. On the other hand, the dependent variable is the alcohol consumption pattern exhibited ten years after college by people who used to binge or drink alcohol in college (Jennison, 2004).
The study used secondary data collection method, which focused on data collected by National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1984 and 1994 on college students with the intention of establishing alcohol-drinking patterns during and after college (Jennison, 2004).
In this method, data contained in National Longitudinal Survey of Youth records were sampled based on where the student lived (for example, hostel, another rented dwelling, or parental homestead) as well as on marriage status (for example, whether, single, married, or cohabiting in the above-mentioned dwellings).
Moreover, Sampling was done based on gender, race, and age, with the latter taking into consideration, freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduates in order to have an all-inclusive representation. In order to adhere to ethical standards of research, all information was treated with confidentiality except the information extracted from public domains; the identity of all participants was also restricted.
The study used both qualitative and quantitative data whereby, the former included drinking patterns, lifestyle, labor status, occupation, and demographics, while the latter probed the quantity and frequency of alcohol consumption. Other qualitative measures include alcohol-related problems in college, such as academic work interference, relationship with other students when drunk, and after-drinking experiences.
Only those adults who were assessed as students in 1984 were included in the 1994 survey and, here, DSM-IV-defined diagnostic criteria were used to establish whether they had engaged in alcohol use during the past year. In the analysis, a logistic regression model was used to assess the relationship between binge drinking in college and ten years after college, with statistical tools being the unadjusted odds ratios, adjusted odds ratios, and confidence intervals (Jennison, 2004).
In the 1984 study, participants were 1885 college students who comprised 966 male and 919 female students. The participants were then refined to include only those students, 1447, who had taken alcohol a month before the interview, among them being 769 male and 678 female students. In 1994 interviews, participants included 967 adults who had been assessed in college ten years ago, comprising 541 males and 426 females (Jennison, 2004).
Findings of the study were divided into three categories – those related to college binge drinking in 1984, those related to binge drinking and problems in college and those related to alcohol dependence and abuse after college, 1994. The results of binge drinking in college indicate that more male students were binge drinkers than female students were; for instance, frequent male binge drinkers were 25% compared to females who were 18% (Jennison, 2004).
In addition, abstainers and non-binge drinkers were more likely to be female students than being male students with a difference of about 5% in each category (Jennison, 2004). In relation to binge drinking and alcohol problems in college, the results showed that binge drinkers had a higher chance of suffering from alcohol-related problems in college than non-binge drinkers. Moreover, frequent binge drinkers had the highest chance of developing alcohol-related problems compared to other categories, represented by 40%.
Gender comparisons showed that female students who were frequent binge drinkers had a high odds ratio of over three times their male counterparts to develop alcohol-related problems, and in the event, they developed hangover, female students suffered more problems that interfered with their academic work.
When assessed according to class, male students in lower levels of college exhibited a higher odds ratio and significance index to experience alcohol problems than their senior counterparts did. Off-campus and away-from-parents living also showed that those students who binged infrequently but lived away from home or college had a high chance to experience alcohol problems. These statistics tend to be inclined to male students rather than female students at odds ratios of 4.3 and 3.5, respectively (Jennison, 2004).
Findings for alcohol dependence and abuse after college based on 1994 data showed that there was a correlation between binge taking in college and alcohol dependence and abuse later in life. This is illustrated by the statistics depicting alcohol dependence among males and females, standing at 22% and 14% respectively, and alcohol abuse showing a 5% gap skewed towards male (Jennison, 2004).
More statistics showed varying results between males and females in relation to suffering alcohol problems, including tolerance and withdrawal symptoms. For instance, results showed that although males had a higher chance, 10%, of suffering from to tolerance symptoms than females, 8%, it was the opposite when it came to withdrawal symptoms where females had a significantly higher rate at 29% compared to males’ 16%.
Moreover, statistics showed that females were more likely to abandon their roles in the workplace, home, or college by engaging in alcohol consumption than males were, with rates of about 37% and 34% respectively (Jennison, 2004). Surprisingly, females seemed to be more careless in relation to their safety, as they seemed to take alcohol in situations that could endanger their lives, such as drunk driving.
Finally, the findings showed a high likelihood of alcohol dependence and abuse for those people who binged in college, and to some extent, the alcohol problems they experienced were likely to continue haunting them later in life. The situation was even worse for those who were unmarried, with statistics showing that females did tend to develop alcohol dependence and abuse habits at an odds ratio of 3.7 and 2.2 compared to males’ 2.9 and 2.0 respectively (Jennison, 2004).
When occupation and college attainment were related to current drinking habits, there was a high correlation between them. A person who used to drink frequently in college either dropped out of college or performed poorly, and as a result, he/she was likely to access jobs that were not as prestigious as those jobs accessed by those who did not drink binge.
Consequently, they were more likely to abuse alcohol, with statistics showing 20% and 37% alcohol abuse-related cases for males and females, respectively (Jennison, 2004). In relation to males, blue-collar jobs, and poor performance in college contributed significantly to their alcohol abuse and dependence patterns (Jennison, 2004).
This study experienced several limitations, one of them being potential bias in the sample of 1994 as a follow-up of the 1984 college sample. Primarily, the study had to be affected by attrition of participants due to the fact that some of the sampled students in 1984 were likely to have died, moved without a trace, or refused to take part in 1994 surveys. Another limitation was that the study assumed students began drinking alcohol in college. Thus it did not take into consideration the possibility of drinking taking place in high school.
There are possibilities that drinking habits exhibited by adults may have been influenced by high school drinking habits and experiences. The third limitation was the failure to estimate lifetime dependence prevalence, thus making it difficult to understand the pattern of binge drinking from college time to later years in life.
Lastly, the relationship between alcohol abuse or dependence and labor markets seemed to suffer from lack of a clear causal-effect explanation, given that the direction may be either way; thus, no empirical evidence is available to show the exact position (Jennison, 2004).
This research could be extended to include data related to college students’ health, awareness programs, and mitigations. In addition, the scope of the study should be enlarged to include data on continued diverse programs aimed at prevention of college drinking as well as strategies for redefining college cultures in order to eliminate the inherent risk factors that propagate alcohol drinking in colleges.
In conclusion, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of the long-term effect of alcohol drinking among college students. It is illustrated that an individual’s binge drinking patterns and associated alcohol problems in college have a long-term influence on alcohol dependence and abuse patterns later in life.
Although the study has established a correlation between the two variables, there seem to be limitations in relation to attrition of sample size, failure to recognize the possibility of drinking onset in high school, the unclear pattern of dependence prevalence, and volatile causal-effect pattern between alcohol abuse or dependence and labor market.
Therefore, more research is needed in order provide adequate data on the health of students, strategies to mitigate causative factors of college culture on alcohol drinking among college students, which are likely to interfere with their later life after college.
Reference
Jennison, K. (2004). The Short-Term Effects and Unintended Long-Term Consequences of Binge Drinking in College: A 10-Year Follow-Up Study. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 30(3): 659–684.