Drinking On College Campuses: A Literature Review

The #1 health problem associated with college campuses is student drinking (Champion, Lewis, & Myers, 2015). According to the U. S Department of Health and Human Services, there was a “call to action to prevent and reduce underage drinking, with an emphasis on college campuses (As cited in Champion et al., 2015)”. According to Wechsler and Nelson, of the students attending 4 year universities, 44% of them are partaking in binge drinking which they defined as 4 or more drinks for females and 5 or more drinks for male (As cited in Champion et al., 2015). After almost 20 years there is still no resolution to this problem.

The social problem the researchers addressed in this article is the excessive alcohol use that occurs on college campus’.

” The researcher then hypothesized that social norms and health beliefs would predict a significant amount of variance in drinking, and do so above and beyond socio-demographic variable. They also predicted a significant mediation effect. The major focus of the literature review was to introduce the reader to the problem of alcohol use and abuse amongst college students and give background on techniques that have been done in the past to help alleviate the problem. Alcohol use/abuse is a staple issue on college campuses, with many efforts to decrease the problem none been successful. One of the major focus’ was identifying the correlation between social norms and college drinking, this was done by

The study was also completed in one location; Southeast regions of the country. Lastly, the survey was a self report so there was no determining whether of not someone was over reporting or under reporting the amount of alcohol they were consuming, which gave people the opportunity to leave questions blank resulting in missing data. Along with the limitations in this study there were strengths as well, although the sampling was done during the summer semester and the questionnaires were not mandatory they were still able to get 283 of the 303 participants to complete the surveys. The variety of schools that they chose to sample from gave them a broad pool to gather their data, giving them the opportunity to collect more diverse