Role of Peer Relationships on Drinking Behavior

Alcohol use by college students is serious. It affects the individual drinker and other students around them. The level of usage is generally set in the pre-college adolescent years during high school. The adolescent's peer group in high school largely determines his drinking behavior. This is also true when the adolescent enters college. The problem of alcohol abuse in college needs to be addressed before the high school years when drinking patterns become entrenched. The transitional period between high school and college should be a window of opportunity for students to change their behavior patterns with respect to alcohol use. This paper will examine the role of peer relationships on drinking behavior, some effects that drinking can have on college students themselves and on other students, and possible intervention strategies which have been tried.

Students, entering college as freshmen, tend to choose friends with the same values that their peer group held in high school. That is, if they used alcohol and drugs with their friends in high school, it is likely that the friends that they choose in college will also share the same values about how much and when to drink or use drugs. Alcohol use can be a determining factor in the choice of new friends (Leibsohn, 1994, p. 179). College students are not usually choosing to lower their level of alcohol consumption upon entering the freshmen class; instead they are often increasing their use of alcohol.

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f individuals to conduct their lives as they choose. One administrator at a large public university on the East coast has observed that "alcohol use and membership in the academic community have traditionally both been linked with the concepts of privilege and freedom" (Reis and Chamberlain, 1994, p. 371). Most people do not like to have what they view as a right curtailed. Students can be shown to have this opinion formed before the completion of high school. Approximately half of high school seniors do not feel that public drunkenness should be illegal; 80 percent did not feel that inebriation in private should be prohibited by law (Reis and Chamberlain, 1994, p. 371). Freshmen in college tend to have more liberal views on alcohol and life than other students. Reis and Chamberlain surveyed college students on their life philosophy toward alcohol and found that 71.7 percent of freshmen could be classified as libertarians (373). Libertarian students were opposed to any external controls on behavior regardless of the source of authority (Reis and Chamberlain, 1994, 379). Some peer groups in college tend to have more members with a libertarian view of life than others. This would be expected. As a freshman student ent

Category: Psychology - R