Alcohol Abuse

Such young adults engage in so called “high risk” or binge drinking, and are in danger of allowing their alcohol use to jeopardize not only their scholastic careers, but also their health. A series of studies have been done in order to predict not only who is at the highest risk, but also the motivation behind such self destructive behaviors, in hopes to better educate students as to how to stay safe. Past research stated that alcohol use has been prevalent amongst those with anxiety and depression disorders, and especially amongst college students. The belief amongst the authors was that perhaps the risky behavior of college athletes is linked to depression.

The alcohol prevention programs would focus on educating potential users as to the ills of alcohol abuse, with the hopes that the student would then begin a personal program of self regulation. Self regulation is a process by which one will first evaluate and recognize their behavior, then determine if this behavior is in keeping with their self image and goals, and if not, take appropriate action to make it so. The authors noted that self regulation programs had already been effective in high risk populations of college campuses, and were now studying whether such a program would be effective for an entire college.

Wilke attempted to determine first whether a variety of individual factors, interpersonal relationships, and contextual factors affected high risk drinking, and secondly, could these factors be used to determine the differences in gender’s and their propensity for high risk drinking. It was found that individual factors and contextual factors played a large part in both genders tendency to participate in high risk drinking. The difference was found to be that interpersonal factors specifically sexual relationships are effective predictors of female drinking, but not male. The authors believe that this link may not be primarily just one related to alcohol, but that increased sexual behavior with multiple partners and binge drinking are both indicators of risky behavior by women, and will thus be engaged in by women.