Heavy drinking across the transition to college: Predicting first-semester heavy drinking from precollege variables
Section snippets
Participants
The target population for the precollege sample (wave 0; the summer prior to college) was all first-time college (FTC) students under the age of 21 who went on to be enrolled at a large Midwestern university on the first day of classes in the fall semester of 2002. The sample obtained at wave 0 consisted of 3720 such individuals. These wave 0 participants were 53.6% female and 90.4% non-Hispanic white and had a mean age on the first day of classes of 18.62 years (S.D. = 0.36) and a mean ACT (a
Heavy drinking across the transition to college
The data for heavy drinking (getting high/light-headed, getting drunk, having 5+ drinks) at waves 0 and 1 are summarized by sex in Table 2, both as percentages across the various response categories and as overall means of the ordinal scales employed in the surveys. Prior to college, about half the male participants reported having engaged in past-30-day heavy drinking (across all three measures) and, in the first semester of college, close to two-thirds of the male participants reporting
Discussion
Parents, college personnel, and society at large are concerned about the escalation of heavy drinking that occurs across the transition to college and persists over the college years; however, because of the dearth of prospective data across the transition, we know very little about the potential influences contributing to this increase. In this paper we use data from our ongoing prospective study of college student drinking to estimate how predictable first-semester heavy drinking is on the
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants to Kenneth J. Sher (R37 AA07231) and Andrew C. Heath (P50 AA11998) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
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