Psy 11b

I decided to do my report on the Prevention of Heavy Drinking and Associated Negative Consequences Among Mandated and Voluntary College Students by Kim Fromme and William Corbin. The author's of the study wanted to find out which is the best way to control the amount of college drinking. He tried to find out different ways to inform students on the affects of alcohol. He felt that college drinking in Texas was getting out of control. He looked at the amount of drinking at schools with mandated drinking programs versus schools with voluntary drinking program and predicted that schools with the mandated drinking programs have less students to have drinking problems than the schools who have voluntary drinking programs. There were 452 participants in the study, all of them being college students. The study was an observational study conducted at the University of Austin Texas. The data was obtained by 3 different assessments that the conductors of the experiment gave to the groups. The questionnaire asked different personal questions of the participants and their alcohol use. Participants also monitored their daily alcohol use on wallet size cards for 1 week prior to each assessment. They recorded the number of standard drinks consumed and the time period of drinking for each day. Similar typical drinking scores as those produced from the DDQ were computed from the monitored data. At the end of the experiment the professors were right about the group who consumed the most alcohol. They also notice that men tend to drink more than women whether they took the class or not. This study would be a good topic in a wellness class or in an orientation to show incoming college students the affects of alcoholism. I think the authors of this study are most supportive of behaviorist. This is because alcohol can change a lot of things in a person and how the way they act. Some limitations was reliability, the study relied on student self-report and did not include either collateral reports or biological markers of alcohol use. They recommended looking at the drinking rate of college Caucasian males and use a BAC scale to have a more reliable research.