College Alcohol-Control Policies and Students' Alcohol Consumption: A Matter of Exposure?
| Autor: | Andrée Demers, Nancy Beauregard, Louis Gliksman |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Contemporary Drug Problems. 40:191-214 |
| ISSN: | 2163-1808 0091-4509 |
| Popis: | College drinking and its social burden represent a current and severe problem for higher education institutions and public health authorities. In a recent priority report, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (2007) emphasized the need to increase cumulative knowledge about higher education institutions' leadership in alcohol control policies and their contributive role to the social production of college drinking. To date, the lack of consistent evidence about such a role has posed a significant limitation to the comprehensive design of healthy public policies by higher education institutions to efficiently tackle the issue of college drinking. The present study offers preliminary guidance on the theoretical and empirical linkages between higher education institutions' leadership and college drinking based on a multilevel analysis of a large national sample of Canadian undergraduates.College drinking: An overview of its social determinantsIt is now widely recognized that college drinking is a multifactorial phenomenon, explained by attributes of the drinker and of the drinking context, as well as their interplay. Numerous studies have consistently shown that students' attributes such as their sociodemographic profile (e.g., gender) and status in school (e.g., place of residence, years in academic curricula, student associative life) were important sources of individual variability in alcohol consumption among college students (Baer, 2002; Gliksman, Newton-Taylor, Adlaf, & Giesbrecht, 1997; Ham & Hope, 2003; Wechsler, Dowdall, Davenport, & Castillo, 1995). Contextual attributes of the drinking occasions account for additional sources of variations in college students' drinking, and emphasize the importance of the relational, temporal and spatial circumstances under which drinking occurs. Precisely, the structural properties of the social interactions which most commonly define students' drinking occasions (e.g., size of drinking group, level of proximity among drinking group members, group gender composition), and the temporal (e.g., day of the week, circumstances of the drinking events) and spatial elements of the drinking occasion (e.g., on/off campus drinking, campus communities) have been associated to students' drinking patterns (Demers et al., 2002; Senchak, Leonard, & Greene, 1998; Trockel, Williams, & Reis, 2003; Weitzman, Chen, & Subramanian, 2005; Yanovitzky, Stewart, & Lederman, 2006). Further, individual and contextual dynamics of college drinking appear to be interrelated. Preliminary work using multilevel analysis has demonstrated that individual variability in college drinking was significantly explained by contextual factors whose relative contribution withstood above and beyond that of specific individual factors (Demers, et al., 2002; Paschall & Saltz, 2007). Consequently, a major contribution of this body of work highlights the fact that students' individual patterns of alcohol consumption are far from being static, and fluctuations observed in that respect can be best conceived as a function of both individual and contextual factors.One potential explanation for individual variability in alcohol consumption points to the different sets of rules superseding social interactions characterizing different drinking contexts (Harford, 1983). Higher education institutions through their alcohol control policies offer such a distinctive normative frame for students' alcohol consumption. By definition, institutional alcohol control policies encompass a wide range of activities ranging from social norm campaigns, alcohol availability, marketing and promotion of alcohol, as well as policy development and enforcement (DeJong & Langford, 2002). Factually, however, these policies remain seldom implemented in their whole (Gebhardt, Kaphingst, & DeJong, 2000; Hirschfeld, Edwardson, & Mcgovern, 2005; Mitchell, Toomey, & Erickson, 2005; Shaffer, Donato, Labrie, Kidman, & Laplante, 2005; Wechsler, Seibring, Liu, & Ahl, 2004). … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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