【09.11.17 今日美国】Students drink more and more often if living in coed dorms

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Students drink more and more often if living in coed dorms
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-11-17-coed17_ST_N.htm

Updated 1d 8h ago By Greg Toppo


Hitting the bar: University of Missouri-Columbia students hang out and drink at Willies. A new study links living in a coed dorm and frequent binge drinking. By Dan Gill, AP

In the past 30 years, coed college dormitories have gone from rare to routine, with nearly all students who live on campus now sharing housing with members of the opposite sex.

But a study out today suggests that the shift may have had unintended results.

It finds that students in coed dorms are far more likely than those in single-sex dorms to drink alcohol regularly – and nearly 2½ times as likely to drink to excess on a weekly basis.

More than 90% of college dorms today house both sexes, generally separated by floors or building wings, say the study's authors – yet very little research has accompanied the change.

The new findings, they say, suggest that colleges searching for ways to reduce binge drinking and other entrenched behaviors may consider whether the social pressures of coed housing are making matters worse.

The study, appearing today in the Journal of American College Health, surveyed 510 students living on five college campuses. Most – 442, or 87% – lived in coed dorms.

These students were more likely to say they'd had a sexual partner in the past year and more likely to think it's all right "for two people to get together for sex and not necessarily expect anything further," the study says.

They were also more likely to say they drink alcohol at least weekly and far more likely to say they drink excessively on a regular basis – 41.5% reported weekly binge drinking. Among students in single-sex housing, the figure was 17.6%.

The new numbers echo previous research, which has put the binge-drinking problem at about 40% of students nationwide. Since 1993, a longitudinal study by the Harvard School of Public Health has consistently found that about 44% of students at four-year colleges in the USA are binge drinkers.

But the new findings on housing and heavy drinking "really caught us off-guard," says study co-author Brian Willoughby, who says the coed dorm students' responses represent "a difference that I think needs to be looked at in greater depth."

Willoughby, who conducted the research while at the University of Minnesota-St. Paul, now teaches at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, as does co-author Jason Carroll.

Some experts aren't impressed by the findings, though.

"Given the choice, only certain types of students would consider living in a coed residence hall, and the fact that they might be more 'libertine' than other students is hardly surprising," says William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health.

"The authors want to suggest that (living in a coed dorm) leads to high-risk behavior, but that conclusion goes beyond their data, which only shows a correlation with choice of residence hall.

"What we can say is that college administrators and parents might want to pay extra attention to students who choose this living option, because they are in fact at higher risk than others."

But Willoughby says his analysis controlled for "potential selection effects" and found that virtually none of the students chose to live in a single-sex dorm; colleges simply placed them there.

All other things being equal, he says, "there was still something unique about living in a coed dorm that was associated with risk-taking."