The high prevalence of problematic alcohol use on college campuses across the United States is well known.
A new study has found that alcohol consumption on 'thirsty Thursdays' is influenced by the presence and timing of Friday class schedules.
Results are published in the July issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
"Roughly 78 percent of the freshmen in our study reported drinking alcohol in the previous three months," said Phillip K. Wood, lead author and professor of quantitative psychology in the department of psychological science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "This number jumped to 85 to 90 percent when most students attained legal age in the third year of the study. It appears that this drinking, when it occurs, is heavy."
Wood said that men who drank at least one drink on Thursday consumed on average between six to 7.5 drinks as a function of Friday-class schedule, while women consumed on average between four and five drinks. Binge drinking - defined as five or more drinks for men and four or more drinks for women - was also dramatic when results were broken out as a function of class schedule: " ... between 50 and 70 perent of students who consumed at least one drink on Thursday reported binge drinking," he said.
"Heavy drinkers not only harm themselves, but others as well," said Ralph Hingson, director of the Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "Drinking by 18- to 24-year-olds [leads to more than] 1,800 deaths annually, nearly 700,000 assaults annually by drinking college students, nearly 100,000 date rapes perpetrated by drinking college students, [and] half of those who die in crashes involving drinking drivers 18 to 24 are people other than the drinking driver." In 2002, a national task force suggested that Friday classes and exams could reduce Thursday night partying. However, this recommendation was based on comments made by college administrators and students, not empirical data. This study, said Wood, is the first to look at the timing of classes on Friday, the day of the week on which drinking occurred, and to assess students in this way for several years.
Researchers recruited 3,341 volunteer undergraduates (56% female, 90% non-Hispanic white) at a large Midwestern public university. Precollege paper-and-pencil and web-based surveys administered in the fall and spring semesters across four years of college were merged with student academic transcripts and university academic schedules. Additional measures included self-reports of drinking during the previous week for each of eight semesters; participation rates ranged from 66.5 to 74 percent across follow-up requests for information.