Drinking and Alcoholism: Gender Divide in College Report (Assessment)

Context

On entering college, one of the more significant and exciting triggers of life cycle change is that one is now of legal drinking age, which is currently 18 years in the country. And yet the Rudd government has now tabled proposals to return the MDA to 21 years owing to evidence from other countries or states (cited by researchers at Deakin University and Drug-Free Australia) that doing so has brought about a 15% reduction in death or injury related to alcohol.

Besides showing that they are perfectly capable of coping with the first drinking bout “rite of passage” (presuming they have not already consumed alcohol illicitly in high school), college students expose themselves to risks of binge drinking, get hungover and miss class, engage in juvenile crimes and have other run-in’s with the police, are more prone to smoke or use drugs, and (for females) bear pronounced risks of incapacitated sexual assault. Emotionally, moderate and heavy drinkers are also liable to depression.

Objectives and Research Questions

In general, the purpose of the research was to arrive at evidence-based recommendations for university policy and guidance programs that could more holistically help students avoid binge drinking or alcoholism and systematically cope with the attendant emotional and substance abuse risks.

Since a comprehensive analysis of such behaviors and emotional effects is beyond the scope of this project, the group focused on a general research objective of defining how men and women differed on such correlates of drinking as:

1. Wanting to “feel high”.
2. Reporting depressive symptoms.
3. The propensity for substance abuse.

Methodology

The study group solicited participation from a total of 10 classes in two universities proximate to QUT. Owing to the nature of the student population, the convenience sample broke out as follows:

• 266 women and 140 men (total n= 406);
• An age range of 17 to 26 years with a mean of 19.1;
• The student body was preponderantly White/Caucasian (89.2%) while Asians comprised 10.8%.

The study instrument comprised a structured, self-administered online questionnaire with the following core items:

1. Alcohol consumption: overall frequency (a pre-defined scale over the past 30 days), frequency of binge drinking (defined as “five or more drinks in one sitting), and incidence of drinking-related problems (dichotomous “yes” or “no” responses to 14 types of adverse consequences).
2. Coping through substance abuse: this is the four-item sub-set of the COPE Inventory. It queries drug or alcohol use in response to stress with a 4-point scale where 4 means “I usually do this all the time” and 1 “I usually don’t do this at all”.
3. Motivation to “feel high”: one question asking the respondents about the proportion of their total drinking occasions when they did so to “feel pretty high”. This is part of the Alcohol and Drug Use section of the “Young Women’s Health Survey”. Answers are on a five-point scale (1=”on one occasion”, 5= “on nearly all occasions”).
4. Depressive symptoms: a composite score of 16 or more (on the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale set of 20 items) suggests a depressive condition. The response was to a three-point scale of prevalence (1= “rarely”, 3= “most of the time”).

We thought to maximize compliance and submission turnaround time by promising a drawing for one $500 AMEX check.

Ethical Issues

Consistent with QUT adherence to the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research and the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans, the study group ensured integrity of the research and respect for the privacy of respondents by:

• Soliciting cooperation by defining the purpose of the study as seeking to update university policy about student drinking with objective information about the preferences and behaviors of students themselves.
• Voluntary participation was documented with a signed consent form attached to each questionnaire.
• Assuring students that no identification would be collected at all and that other personal information could not be used to trace findings back to them. This we guaranteed by processing and presenting only group or aggregate findings.

Findings

Fieldwork Issues

In general, we planned on employing gender and incidence of alcohol consumption as the key independent and explanatory variables.

The incidence of alcohol consumption, too whatever degree, came to 87.9%.

In turn, the dependent variables are summarized as:

1. Frequency of drinking and binge drinking;
2. And the extent to which one drank for the “alcoholic buzz” rather than socially or simply to unwind and relax;
3. Concomitant substance abuse;
4. And one hypothesized cause: owing to a depressive condition.

Data Processing and Descriptive Statistics

As respondents “filled in” or clicked on the appropriate buttons in the online questionnaire, their answers were compiled by the built-in tabulation facility in www.surveymonkey.com. That took care of any data transfer or encoding errors. Hence, the main sources of errors in this study were sampling errors owing to the convenience sampling of soliciting participation from whole classes of undergraduate students. Non-sampling error, in turn, can be assumed from response-entry mistakes made by the respondents online; the presumption is that the study participants may have been conscientious enough to avoid making illogical choices since each stood a chance of winning the promised incentive.

Since the default report presentation consisted solely of a set of bar charts, the raw data was downloaded as a.csv or comma-delimited file for further processing in Minitab.

Table 1: Gender Differences in Drinking Behaviour

After taking into account the tests of differences, it turns out that male college students claim more frequent drinking, binge drinking, more problems stemming from drinking, admitting to wanting to “feel high,” and resorting to either alcohol or drugs (or both) as a coping strategy.

Men typically scored marginally higher than the cut-off in depressive symptoms while women averaged just slightly lower. Essentially, they do not differ in being distressed by the pressures of college life.

Statistical Analysis

At this point, it is well worth mentioning that since most of the items were scaled or ordinal and derived from one large sample (n>30), hypotheses about the significance of differences were amenable to t or Z tests. As well, the presence of four dependent variables opened up the possibility of carrying out a regression analysis.

Table 2: Correlations of major study variables by gender

The derived correlations in Table 2, above, show that for male college students, the “feel high” motivation for alcohol consumption is strongly linked with the frequency of drinking, binge-drinking frequency, and running into various problems owing to heavy drinking. On the other hand, the only significant correlation for women was that between depressive symptoms stumbling onto alcohol-induced consequences.

Conclusion

The findings bear out the hypothesis that college-age males who have just come of legal drinking age freely admit to more alcohol consumption, a greater propensity for coping by resorting to substance abuse and wanting to experience that “alcoholic buzz” more than college coeds do. In turn, female college students were more prone to experience problems after drinking when they did so to shake off depression symptoms; males who sought an alcoholic “high” were also more vulnerable to alcohol-related problems.

One warrants that this finding for men is related to the fact that it is socially acceptable for men to drink to “feel high”, aside from the purely social and celebratory motivations for drinking. Emotions are, on the other hand, a more acceptable springboard for female drinking. This difference helps explain why young females do not drink as often as their male counterparts and are less likely to go on drinking binges when they do.

Since young men and women both experience problems after drinking, the more pragmatic implication of this set of data is that social marketing campaigns should employ responsible drinking as an advertising platform and use it as support claim the negative reinforcement or adverse consequences in point of disapproval by elders, school and legal authorities, and even death and injury. Certainly, this makes more sense than trying to resolve depression among females (college students are easily stressed out) or trying to neutralize generations of socialization that it is perfectly alright for men to use alcohol as a social lubricant and, if they get tipsy in the process, why that is to be expected, too.