Convinced that it was possible to somehow reduce college drinking following a number of on and off-campus incidents involving police, drinking and drunkenness by JSC students last semester, Professor of Behavioral Sciences Gina Mireault’s Research Methods class launched a survey to determine the role that stress plays in college drinking. “They [my students] were convinced that stress played a role in drinking, that students drink to decompress,” said Mireault, who oversaw the survey.
The survey results contradicted that hypothesis. Males, it seems, drink more when the pressure is off, and there is no correlation between stress and female drinking.
The class consisted of 22 students, each of whom had to recruit five unfamiliar males or females. This was not a random sample, and ultimately 98 responses out of the 110 collected were used.
First, these 98 individuals were given two different stress questionnaires. “One was called the Undergraduate Stress Questionnaire,” said Mireault. “That’s a checklist of 82 items, and it asks students to just check off which things apply to them that semester. And it really includes a range, like having a death of a family member or friend, to sitting through a boring class.”
In addition, students were given another stress questionnaire, the Perceived Stress Scale, which has 10 items. “That asks more general things,” she said. “It asks things like ‘in the last month how often have you felt confident about your ability to handle your personal problems, and how often have you been able to control irritations in your life?’ that kind of thing. And they ranged those on a scale of zero to four.”
The Research Methods class also developed it’s own set of questions pertaining to alcohol use. “We asked things like ‘how far are you willing to buy alcohol and how much money are you typically willing to spend on alcohol?’”
The results of the survey were unexpected. “Drinking is a very complicated picture,” said Mireault. Not only did stress not play a factor at all for the females, but there proved to be a weak correlation between lower stress and male drinking.
According to the study, “As stress went down, drinking goes up against men,” said Mireault.
Academic stress for males seems to make them less likely to drink or to drink less. “People drink to celebrate,” she said.
Although the class didn’t calculate a margin of error, there was considerable variability in drinking behavior in the sample. Most drinkers were at the low end of the distribution, but there were a few outliers in the sample (about 8 percent) who drank heavily. “This means the data were highly positively skewed,” said Mireault, who also stressed that the survey sample “was not a representative random sample of JSC students.”
Based on respondent replies, the median, or middle-most score in the distribution was 9.9 drinks per week overall.
“Males tended to drink more,” said Mireault, “and females, as a group, were drinking less.”
For males the median was 14 drinks per week, while for females the median number of drinks per week was 4.
Most of the nondrinkers in the example – about 10 percent – were female.
Part of the differences in drinking patterns could well be socially determined. “Women have much more options available to them socially,” Mireault said, noting that women are more careful because they are generally aware that they could be victimized under the influence.
Running out of time at the end of the semester, the class did not analyze all the information collected in detail. “We really needed to keep the stress variable in focus,” said Mireault.