Behavior/Humans

Women Drink More Than Men in Drinking Games

Dangers posed by such parties

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

8th of January 2008, 19:06 GMT

Adjust text size:

This time, the researchers have participated themselves in such parties, not relying on self reports of the subjects. The results about drinking games and themed parties, published in Alcoholism:

Clinical & Experimental Research, have been a surprise.

"Most studies use survey methods that require people to recall their drinking behavior - days, weeks or months prior - and such recall is not always accurate. By going out into the field and doing observations and surveys, including breath tests for alcohol concentrations, we were able to mitigate many of the problems associated with recall of behavior and complex settings." said corresponding author J.D. Clapp, director of the Center for Alcohol and Drug Studies and Services at San Diego State University.

"Rather than relying on students' reports of the environment, researchers actually gained access to college-student parties and made detailed observations about the characteristics of these parties," said James A. Cranford, research assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan.

The multi-level survey was carried on 1,304 young subjects (751 males, 553females), enrolled in 66 college parties in private residences close to an urban public university in southern California. The research took three semesters and focused on party environments, self-administered questionnaires, and blood-alcohol concentrations (BrACs).

"Both individual behavior and the environment matter when it comes to student-drinking behavior. At the individual level, playing drinking games and having a history of binge drinking predicted higher BrACs. At the environmental level, having a lot of intoxicated people at a party and themed events predicted higher BrACs. One of the more interesting findings was that young women drank more heavily than males at themed events. It is rare to find any situation where women drink more than men, and these events tended to have sexualized themes and costumes." said Clapp.

"Conversely, students who attended parties in order to socialize had lower levels of drinking. Interestingly, larger parties were associated with less drinking." said Cranford.

But this was put rather in less available alcohol at larger parties, rather then behavioral causes.

"From a methodological standpoint, our study illustrates that is possible and important to examine drinking behavior in real-world settings. It is more difficult than doing web surveys and the like, but provides a much richer data set. Secondly, environmental factors are important. Much of the current research on drinking behavior focuses on individual characteristics and ignores contextual factors," said Clapp.

"Hosts should not allow drinking games and students should avoid playing them. Such games typically result in large amounts of alcohol being consumed very quickly - a dangerous combination," he added.

TAGS:

alcohol | game | behavior

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: