Drinking Habits of Freshmen Group Project

Question When freshmen live off campus, do they drink more than when they live on campus?

Why is this important? Influence University policy/government laws & regulations Impacts student life on college campuses At MIT: all freshmen must live on campus!

Alternate Explanations Past experience: High School & Parent’s Drinking Habits Living Environment: Substance free- housing, single sex housing, roommates

Background Henry Wechsler: Principal Researcher, Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Studies (CAS) every 3-4 years 1993 study prompted examination of heavy-episodic “binge” drinking. 90s: alcohol abuse classified #1 public health problem facing college students by Surgeon General and CDC

Statistics 1 in 3 college students use of alcohol qualified for formal diagnosis of alcohol abuse Continued attempts in 1990s  Little change Efforts aimed at educational aspects; no environmental changes (thought to be major cause of alcohol issues)

Method: Data Random sample Relevant variables  STATA datasets to analyze Recoded and dummy variables created for comparison across datasets

Method: Answering the Question Variables “on” and “off” for freshmen place of residence Measure for total drinks consumed in a 30- day period: (total drinks= drinking occasions x drinks per occasion) Compared percentage of on-campus freshmen who drank to the percentage of total alcohol those on-campus freshmen drank

Survey Questions How many occasions in the last 30 days have you had a drink? How many drinks, on average, did you drink each time? Combining the questions (problematic)

On CampusOff Campus Mean= ~43Mean= ~34 SD= ~68SD= ~72 The data we have: total_drinks histogram

On CampusOff Campus Occasions Number of drinks Mean (occasions/past 30 days): Mean (average drinks/occasion):

Alcohol allowed in student’s housingNo alcohol allowed Occasions Number of drinks Mean (occasions/past 30 days): Mean (average drinks/occasion):

Non-GreekGreek Number of drinks Occasions Mean (occasions/past 30 days): Mean (average drinks/occasion):

Method: Rival Explanations For Greek membership & alcohol-free housing, we repeated the same analysis procedure:  Generated binary dataset for (X, not X); X=possible explanatory variable  Created table of (X, not X) total drinks consumed in the past 30 days  Compared percentage of respondents who were X with percentage of total alcohol drunk by respondents who were X

Percent respondents Percent total drinksDifference On Off Alcohol-free Alcohol allowed Non-Greek Greek Who consumes the alcohol? Total alcohol consumed by the students surveyed in 30 days previous to survey: 3951 respondents drank 163,058 drinks (average 41 drinks/person) *Note: Among those who drank/answered both questions

Results… As far as we can tell, when freshmen live on campus, they are no less thirsty than those who live off campus. This is true when we look at number of times they drink… And number of drinks they have on each occasion.

But… There may be unavoidable shortcomings, either in our methodology, or in the data. Do we look at total drinks? Or do we look at measures of drunkenness? We chose to attempt to quantify the number. This assumes an even distribution of sex… And a normal distribution of weights.

I said hey…what’s going on? Perhaps people who drank in high school drink more in college. Engineering students may drink more because of chronic depression. Students at easy schools drink more. Data for high school drinking was lost… Data for majors was not taken across all surveys… Schools were not identified.

So why should schools care? Measures to force freshmen to live on campus may not be as productive… Providing substance free housing may be a waste… Because the most significant finding we had was…

Further thought and research… We have identified several distinct categories of drinkers which may be of interest to college policymakers. Greek/Non-Greek histogram A measure of what constitutes harmful behavior needs to be determined.  Is binge drinking frequently the problem?  Is binge drinking infrequently the problem?  Are Greek organizations really to blame?

Questions?

Non-GreekGreek Number of drinks Occasions