Drinking at a southern university: its description and correlates

A sample of 100 undergraduate students at a southern college campus were employed to answer computer-administered questions once a week for 20 weeks. This facility was used to collect both intensive and comprehensive data to describe respondents' drinking and its correlates. Although women were somewhat less likely to be abstainers than were men, women were disproportionately represented among moderate-only drinkers and men were overrepresented among heavy drinkers. The data indicate that the change in respondents' reported drinking was quite volatile in the transition from high school to college. Heavy-drinking college students reported that they drank in bars accompanied by friends. Different types of drinkers (e.g., moderate, infrequent, heavy) attributed different motives to drinking as well as to sometimes abstaining, but they held similar antialcohol beliefs. The drinking-related variables of friends explained more of the variance in respondents' drinking than did those of their parents. However, the variance explained by the parents' drinking-related variables was increased when statistical interactions involving family cohesion and control were included. The variance explained by the friends' drinking-related variables was also greater when interactions with respondents' spending money were included. There was a small positive correlation between socioeconomic status and drinking. The only variables to decrease this relationship when statistically controlled were the drinking-related variables of significant others.