Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

by Thomas Vander Ven

  Conclusion

  I live in a college community where there is plenty of antistudent sentiment. I hear it all the time. College students are drunken idiots. They are anti-intellectual, they have no civility or respect for other people, they are wasting their own opportunity at education and disrupting the academic careers of their nondrinking peers. They vomit in public, they pass out and black out, they burn couches, make fools of themselves, and have casual, risky sex. It’s out of control. It’s disgusting. What’s wrong with them? When group intoxication is measured by puke puddles and burnt couches and arrest reports, then, yes, it can be alarming. But college drinkers see it another way. Drinking with friends is liberating. Drunkenness opens people up to intimate conversations and unlocks the door to relationships. Intoxicated friends sing and dance together and laugh until they cannot breathe. And when things fall apart, as they inevitably do, drinking partners are there for one another. The love, nurturing, compassion, and support given from one drinker to another represent powerful cultural ideals that we can all embrace (whether we drink or not). The college experience fosters beautiful friendships that can last a lifetime, and the world of adventure that alcohol facilitates is often the primary context for those friendships. Maybe drinking episodes are not the ideal contexts for relationship building and character development. Maybe we have done our children a disservice, somehow, by making them so self-conscious that they think they need alcohol to interact freely and confidently with others. These are big questions that cannot be addressed with the current data set. What we do know, however, is that many college drinkers believe that the joys of intoxication outweigh the risks that getting wasted brings. And to be sure, the college drinking scene is loaded with dangers and risk. Those risks must be managed, and college students should be enlisted to take part in that management. And, so, a final word to college drinkers: If you are going to drink (and we know that many of you are), I have just one request. Take care of each other.

  METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX

  Drinking stories and interview data were collected at three different university sites. Data were drawn from undergraduate student responses to in-class surveys and the intensive interviewing of a separate sample. Over the course of several years (2003-2009), I administered 469 surveys and conducted twenty-five interviews across three American universities: a small private college in the Northern Central region of the United States (“Northern College”), a commuter-based state school in the Southeast (“Southeastern State University”), and a large state school in the Midwest (“Midwestern State University”). I strategically targeted these three distinct college environments in order to gather data from a variety of university experiences. I gained access to these sites through previously established professional relationships. In fact, I received a tremendous amount of support and cooperation from many course instructors at the three different institutions; they graciously allowed me to invade their classrooms to survey their students about college drinking.

  First, the surveys asked informants to give basic demographic information (i.e., sex, age, academic class, estimated family income). Overall, the survey sample had a mean age of twenty years, and 56 percent of the respondents were female. The sample contained 35 percent freshmen, 25 percent sophomores, 21 percent juniors, and 19 percent seniors. The sample respondents represent a relatively privileged population. The mean family income for this group was $92,000 per year. While this figure is significantly larger than the national average for median family income, it should come as no surprise. The UCLA Cooperative Institutional Research Program reported that 2005 college freshmen held median family incomes that were 60 percent higher than the national average.1

  Although it was originally part of the research design, I did not ask respondents to report their racial or ethnic group membership. Race was excluded as a variable because the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at one of my research sites would not approve the research if I insisted on including a “race/ethnicity” category on the survey. According to the IRB, the presence of minorities was so small at their institution that it would be relatively easy to link a survey response to a particular student if the student identified himself or herself as something other than white. For example, if I surveyed a class of seventy-five students and only two of them were African American, the IRB believed that I could easily connect their stories to their identities after they turned in their surveys. Confidentiality is a critical component of research involving human subjects and, though I did not agree with the decision to omit race and ethnicity from the surveys, I accepted the verdict. The lack of information on racial and ethnic group membership, however, is clearly one of the limitations of my study. I was able to interview three African American students (out of my total interview sample of twenty-five) at Midwestern State University. These students had some unique insights—some of which are included in the book—and made me even more curious about the mostly unexplored relationship between race and heavy drinking in college. I hope to explore that link in future research.

  Respondents were recruited in introductory sociology, criminal justice, and psychology courses to complete surveys. Informants were asked to write a true anecdote or story about the most recent time they used alcohol to the point of intoxication. While questions designed to help guide these narratives were provided, respondents were encouraged to elaborate in order to facilitate a naturally flowing factual story of the last time they drank to intoxication. The instructions for writing the drinking stories encouraged respondents to include information on the following areas: how they decided to drink on this particular occasion; how they obtained the alcohol; what they drank and how much they consumed; how they consumed it (e.g., leisurely drinking, drinking games); how it “felt” to be intoxicated; whether there were consequences of the drinking episode. Finally, respondents were asked to relay any other information that they felt was relevant. Asking respondents to write an in-class report about “the most recent time” that alcohol was used to the point of intoxication helped to randomize drinking-experience responses. This approach avoided having informants recount stories relating to the “best time,” “worst time,” or “drunkest time” that respondents had encountered while intoxicated.

  Intensive interviews were arranged through snowball sampling of university students. Students were asked to provide my name and contact information to potential informants, who contacted me if they agreed to be interviewed. Interviewees were asked to refer other potential participants to the investigators. This process resulted in a pool of interviewees that included friends, dorm-mates, housemates, and classmates of informants. Interviews lasted between thirty minutes and one hour. The construction of the interview questionnaires was guided by a preliminary analysis of the first round of completed surveys (N=120). While interviewees were also asked to recount their most recent drinking episode, I was able to probe the respondents further and follow story threads down different pathways. This approach resulted in a richer data set than would have been collected if I had relied on surveys alone. All respondents were required to be at least eighteen years of age to participate. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed.

  After data were collected, the stories and interviews were coded for content. Each story and interview transcript was reviewed multiple times, and recurrent themes were identified. In order to do this, I formulated coding terms that served as tools with which to build conceptual categories. For example, I developed a family of terms to search for when looking for themes related to sexual encounters or hooking up. These key words included such terms as “hooked up with,” “slept with,” “making out,” “touching or petting.” If these words or others relating to sex or sex-seeking behavior were identified in the qualitative data set, they were noted on coding sheets and then cataloged in a “sex quote log,” which contained both the respondent’s use of a key term as well as his or her explanation of content relating to the key term. This same process was used to build other thema
tic categories (e.g., hangovers, deciding to drink, getting sick, etc.). Using the basic principles of grounded theory, I analyzed the data by creating and relating categories that were grounded in the lived experiences and cognitive worlds of my informants.2 My ideas about how and why college students drink, then, are grounded in the data generated by the surveying, interviewing, and observing of my respondents. While another researcher may have seen a different set of patterns in the data, the insights offered in this study represent my interpretations based on my deep and exhaustive readings of the data.

  It was easy to find college students willing to discuss the university drinking culture. Most of my respondents were even enthusiastic about participating in the study. But can we trust these data? Some critics might wonder if my respondents were being truthful when they provided accounts of their most recent drinking episode. It would be impossible to determine which, if any, of my drinking stories or interview accounts were embellished. Furthermore, one might wonder how respondents were able to provide valid remembrances of their drinking experiences when—by definition—alcohol was involved, which could have had an effect on their ability to recall the details of a drinking episode. Let’s deal with the first concern first. Were my respondents truthful? I am confident that—by and large—they were. Students were under no special obligations to complete surveys, and they were assured in different ways that their contributions would remain anonymous. Drinking stories were collected in medium to large introductory classes, and I only surveyed and interviewed students who were unknown to me. Furthermore, I took special care to let them know that there was no way that their stories would be connected to their names or identities. Informants were instructed to avoid using any personal names in their accounts. Instead, they were asked to use role titles (e.g., my roommate, my resident advisor, my friend). Finally, there was no pressure from me or course instructors to complete surveys. Potential respondents who did not feel comfortable contributing to the research were asked simply to write, “I do not wish to participate” on the survey. Very few students selected this option (less than 2 percent of all potential survey respondents took this route). So, if deceit played a part at all in the construction of drinking stories, I don’t believe that it was because students felt that they would be identified and sanctioned in some way for their intoxicated behaviors. But even if respondents were giving honest accounts, how can we trust their memories of events that occurred when they were intoxicated? The accurate recall of past events can be difficult for any research subject even if he or she is not under the influence of alcohol. My informants, however, were often very clear about those events that they could remember and those that they could not. It was not uncommon in the data, for example, for a respondent to acknowledge that he or she could no longer provide an accurate account of the remainder of the night in question. Tara (the featured informant in chapter 2), for instance, gives a detailed account of her drinking episode up to a point, but then recognizes that the rest of the night is lost to her (“Well, I don’t remember walking home, nor do I remember going to bed.”). Thus, I feel confident that my respondents tried to distinguish between those events that they could remember and those that were buried by intoxication.

  Another potential concern about the data relates to the idea that my respondents may have mischaracterized their behaviors and the behavior of their friends in order to make their actions seem more positive, responsible, or even heroic. After all, my data suggest that there is a lot of social support shared among college students in the drinking scene; they seem to be acting benevolently towards one another a lot of the time. After spending many hours doing field research and talking to college drinkers, however, I trust that these support-themed accounts are mostly genuine and accurate. I witnessed supportive behaviors first-hand (e.g., people caring for sick friends, consoling sad ones, and escorting staggering drinking partners home), and the interview accounts of these behaviors seemed heartfelt and true. Furthermore, as discussed in previous chapters, some respondents admitted to being less than supportive in other instances (e.g., drawing on the faces of their passed-out friends and roommates and avoiding friends who have a reputation for being high-maintenance drunks). And some of the shame-filled drinking stories demonstrate that my respondents often felt truly bad about some of their objectionable and destructive behaviors and did not attempt to “dress them up” or justify them (except to say “I was drunk”) to neutralize the guilt they may have felt. In other words, many respondents owned up to their drunken missteps and did not try to reframe them in a positive light. College drinkers, I believe, see and distinguish between the good and the bad in the drinking scene.

  There are some elements of college drinking culture that are conspicuously missing from my data. For example, given the high rate of sexual victimization—especially of women—on American campuses, it is surprising that none of my respondents described their own victimization or even having direct knowledge of a sexual assault or rape. On the other hand, it may not be that surprising since sexual crimes, especially those committed by loved ones and acquaintances, are commonly underreported in most crime data sets. I have no doubt that sexual assaults and rapes occur on the campuses where I did my research, but none of the students I surveyed or interviewed chose to discuss this issue. The fact that many of the students in the sample discussed the methods that they and their friends use to reduce the risk of sexual victimization, however, suggests that they are well aware of the risks present in the drinking scene.

  Similarly, there is little mention of drug use in my study. Clearly, college students don’t limit themselves to alcohol when they party. But where are the drugs in this analysis? Several respondents mentioned that they smoked marijuana during their most recent drinking episode, and one other student discussed her codrinker’s cocaine use as sort of an aside. I suspect that drug use is missing from my data for a few reasons. First, and foremost, I never asked them directly about drug use on the surveys or in the interviews. Second, my respondents may have felt more apprehensive about discussing their use of drugs because it is illegal and carries a heavier stigma than alcohol use does. One might argue that alcohol use has become so readily accepted on campus that it seems to be normative behavior to many students. Thus, they had no problems giving details on their heavy drinking episodes but stayed silent about their use of other kinds of intoxicants.

  My analysis was supplemented throughout the study by many hours of field work. I spent a lot of time in bars, house parties, and in the downtown bar district at Midwestern State University over the course of the research. Early on in the study, I recorded my field notes with a pen and paper. This strategy was cumbersome, felt unnatural, and often drew attention to me (e.g., some students thought that I was a newspaper reporter or a liquor control agent (a state official who enforces liquor-related laws). One night on the town, I decided to dictate my field notes into my cell phone. I simply used the voice notes function on my phone to record my spoken word observations. Later, I would return home or to my office and write a field note based on the shorthand observations that I spoke into my phone. One of the advantages of this approach was that it made my field work less conspicuous to my audience (i.e., when I was dictating a field note, it just appeared as if I was having a phone conversation).

  The nature of my field work would be best described as nonparticipant observation. While I mixed with college students at bars, parties, and festivals, I did not participate in their festivities (i.e., I did not drink alcohol while I was in the field to collect data). I walked among my research subjects when I attended festivals or observed them from a distant barstool. I did, on occasion, interview students whom I observed in the field to shed additional insight on their behaviors. And many college drinkers approached me while I was in the field to question my presence there or just to socialize. As one might guess, I did encounter some fairly intoxicated individuals in the field. In the following field note, I describe my crude formula for intera
cting with the intoxicated students that I met during the course of the research.

  Mark (my friend and a graduate student in history) and I are walking up Henderson Street during the street festival. A large, very drunk, young male approaches us. He steps in and bellows in our faces, his beer raised high in some unknown victory. I shake his hand and commiserate with him about how bad the music is that is coming from some nearby backyard. This conversation goes on for a while until the drunk moves on to someone else. Mark wants to know how I “did that.” He wants to know how I talk to drunks so easily. He said that guys like this make him nervous. I thought about it for a while and then gave him my formula. I told Mark that all I do with drunks is aggressively agree with everything they say and shake their hands, give them a high five, some form of ritualistic agreement over and over again. With this particular guy, I kept agreeing with him that the music was terrible (though I couldn’t even hear what it was). According to him, the music “fucking sucked!” I kept saying, “Yeah it does!” and offering another handshake. It was easy to join with the drunk. It would have been just as easy for our simple interaction to turn into a conflict. (Field note, Spring 2004)

  Clearly, every time I encountered a drunk individual, it was a data collection opportunity. One might assume that interacting with intoxicated students presented challenges for data collection, but I rarely found my interactions with college drinkers to be problematic. The students that I met in the field were never confrontational towards me directly and were usually helpful and respectful. I aspired to take a nonjudgmental stance with them and was willing to develop brief and fleeting friendships with those members of the drinking scene who approached me. There were a few “ugly moments” during my data collection. In the spring of 2009, for example, my wife and I attended an annual street party at Midwestern State University that evolved into a violent confrontation between students and police. We arrived at the party around dusk and I immediately had the feeling that the tone there represented one of the most mean-spirited climates that I had encountered while in the field. Students were fighting, throwing bottles, and being antagonistic towards each other and to the police officers who were there to control the festivities. After a beer bottle hit the ground near our feet and shattered, we decided that we had seen enough and chose—for the first and only time during my research—to leave the research site because of the safety risks it presented. Later that evening, one of my research assistants texted me from the street party. She advised me to “hurry back” to the street party because the students were setting couches on fire and clashing with the police. I returned to the scene alone, but was not able to gain access to the street because of a police blockade. Chaotic events like this receive a lot of media attention and are a genuine problem on some campuses. The great majority of the interactions that I witnessed in the drinking scene, however, were relatively peaceful.