Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Shorter Weekend Means Less Drinking


Friday morning classes can prevent Thursday night binge drinking at colleges and universities, a study from the University of Missouri says. The results of this research has some college campuses offering more Friday morning classes.

Students with the opportunity to sleep in on Friday tend to drink (on average) just over one additional drink on Thursday night than students who have a class before 10a.m. Friday.

The study is published in the July issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, and will be on reserve at Logue Library in early October. Search the "Education Research" databases in EBSCOhost and Newsbank's major US newspapers using keywords college students AND drinking AND friday.

An earlier study of New Zealand Students showed similar results, but emphasized that students with heavier drinking habits simply avoid scheduling Friday classes.* Some schools are encouraged by the current research to offer more Friday morning required courses to make heavier drinking habits less convenient.

This article from the Columbia Tribune in Columbia, Missouri, home of the University of Missouri, is free on the web here:
Drinking study prompts change, but not at MU
By JONATHON BRADEN of the Tribune’s staff
Published Monday, September 24, 2007

*Friday Class and Heavy Alcohol Use in a Sample of New Zealand College Students. By: Paschall, Mallie J.; Kypri, Kypros; Saltz, Robert F.. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Sep2006, Vol. 67 Issue 5, p764-769.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just read the report of the study mentioned in the Columbia Tribune article. It is on reserve here under ENG101. Ok, skimmed, not read. Even though I did ok in statistics, when you tell me “estimation of a fully crossed model was not possible …” and get into “adjusted least square means” (Wood, Sher and Rutledge, p 1201) I am happy to rely on peer review to evaluate their methods. I just want to know what they looked at and what they found out.

This was a huge study – over 3000 participants. That seems really good. Don’t interview five people and tell me “everyone thinks…”. The students were all from one university. Is life the same at Philadelphia colleges as “a large Midwestern University”? They were all first-year students. Any first year students here who look at the article want to let us know if they think Philly people are the same? Do these findings match your experience?

This study found that men drink more than women; fraternity and sorority members drink more than others; Thursday is the heaviest drinking night. Students with a Friday morning class did not drink as much on Thursday and this carried over across the weekend, especially for men. The Friday class affected Thursday drinking even for people who drank a lot in high school and/or drank more during semesters when they only had Mon- Thur classes. Oh, in their conclusions they note that most people are reluctant to take early Friday morning classes. Now that I would believe without surveying 3000+ people.