Comments on: signs of a dangerous party http://thesocietypages.org/citings/2009/01/09/signs-of-a-dangerous-party/ Scanning the journals and tracking the media for the best in cutting edge social science, served up in a concise, snappy style. Edited by students in the undergraduate and graduate sociology programs at the University of Minnesota. Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:58:34 +0000 hourly 1 By: minnesotatiger http://thesocietypages.org/citings/2009/01/09/signs-of-a-dangerous-party/#comment-319 minnesotatiger Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:27:27 +0000 http://thesocietypages.org/crawler/?p=450#comment-319 I served on a faculty/staff committee at Cornell that reviewed the University's efforts to effectively communicate to students the dangers of binge drinking. It was a good committee with thoughtful people and a range of perspectives, but I walked away feeling there were two fundamental problems in such communications that was very difficult to address, and that is the sense that many of the adults in the room disapproved of any level of drinking for 18- and 19-year-olds, and that most of them disapproved of any amount more than one or two drinks per evening. . . so when some of us on the committee pointed out the moralism that pervaded official communications re: alcohol, most of the committee didn't see the problem. The other was a definition of binge drinking that would probably include most habits of most college students who drink -- "more than 5 drinks in one night." But imagine the difference between these two scenarios: a) a student has a beer at dinner time (6 pm) and is out until 2 am, consuming 5 or 6 drinks total and b) a student goes to a party at 10 pm and stays till 1 am, consuming 6 drinks total. Communications about binge drinking never got down to the details that would allow college students to understand the specific concerns motivating the message. Combined, these two things led students to conclude that the University officials just "didn't get it" when it came to drinking. The upshot is, I think it may not be that students are unconcerned about alcohol, but that they're only concerned about it when it's coupled with other danger signs. Maybe colleges -- and other organizations that tend to be in loco parentis -- should concentrate on communicating about those things in a college environment that differentiate "safe" from "unsafe" drinking, since years of experience would seem to indicate that it's a lost cause to get students to think of ALL drinking as dangerous. I served on a faculty/staff committee at Cornell that reviewed the University’s efforts to effectively communicate to students the dangers of binge drinking. It was a good committee with thoughtful people and a range of perspectives, but I walked away feeling there were two fundamental problems in such communications that was very difficult to address, and that is the sense that many of the adults in the room disapproved of any level of drinking for 18- and 19-year-olds, and that most of them disapproved of any amount more than one or two drinks per evening. . . so when some of us on the committee pointed out the moralism that pervaded official communications re: alcohol, most of the committee didn’t see the problem. The other was a definition of binge drinking that would probably include most habits of most college students who drink — “more than 5 drinks in one night.” But imagine the difference between these two scenarios: a) a student has a beer at dinner time (6 pm) and is out until 2 am, consuming 5 or 6 drinks total and b) a student goes to a party at 10 pm and stays till 1 am, consuming 6 drinks total. Communications about binge drinking never got down to the details that would allow college students to understand the specific concerns motivating the message. Combined, these two things led students to conclude that the University officials just “didn’t get it” when it came to drinking.

The upshot is, I think it may not be that students are unconcerned about alcohol, but that they’re only concerned about it when it’s coupled with other danger signs. Maybe colleges — and other organizations that tend to be in loco parentis — should concentrate on communicating about those things in a college environment that differentiate “safe” from “unsafe” drinking, since years of experience would seem to indicate that it’s a lost cause to get students to think of ALL drinking as dangerous.

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