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Due to the emergence of research literature examining the prepartying behavior of college students, the present study examines students' varying drinking rates, blood alcohol levels (BALs), and alcohol-related consequences during two drinking events - one involving prepartying and one devoid of prepartying. Two-hundred and thirty-eight student drinkers completed an online drinking assessment detailing their two most recent drinking occasions involving and not involving prepartying. Participants responded to a series of questions regarding quantities consumed on the drinking day and occurrence of alcohol-related consequences. While men did not differ in drinking or estimated BALs, between the two drinking days, female participants drank significantly more drinks and reached higher BALs on the prepartying drinking day. Both males and females reported increased experience of alcohol-related consequences on the prepartying drinking day. In analyzing the prepartying drinking day specifically, we found that while men drink more alcohol during prepartying, but both men and women reached similar BALs during the event. Also, amount consumed during prepartying related to further drinking throughout the evening. It appears that prepartying may influence women to reach comparable levels of intoxication and alcohol-related consequences as their male peers. Quick drinking during prepartying may raise BALs and lead to alcohol-related consequences particularly for female students.

Perceived public stigma regarding seeking mental health treatment seeking can be a barrier to accessing services for young adults. While factors associating with personal stigma regarding how one would view and treat others have been identified, the discrepancies between perceived and personal stigma has received less research attention. We designed the current study to expand on previous research and examine the discrepancies between perceived public stigma and personal stigma among a sample of 386 primarily White and Asian college students. Participants completed surveys of mental health symptoms, treatment experience and attitudes, perceived public, and personal stigma. Overall, participants generally reported greater perceived public stigma than personal stigma; an effect that was particularly evident for women and those with mental health symptoms. The majority of participants disagreed with items assessing personal stigma. Negative attitudes toward treatment and anxiety symptoms associated with perceived public stigma, while male gender, Asian ethnicity, and negative attitudes toward treatment associated with personal stigma. Findings have implications for interventions and marketing programs to help change perceptions about mental health stigma to encourage utilization of services for those young people who could benefit from care.

Objective-The present study examines the relationships among reasons for drinking, alcohol consumption, and alcohol-related consequences in two college-aged samples. Personal motivators such as mood enhancement and coping (tension reduction) have consistently been shown to predict problematic alcohol use, but because of the salient nature of social drinking in college, we hypothesized that social reasons for drinking would be most frequently endorsed and, in turn, predict negative consequences.Method-Two distinct samples-119 coed adjudicated students sanctioned by the university for violating campus alcohol policy and 106 co-ed volunteer students-completed measures assessing alcohol consumption, reasons for drinking, and consequences. Differential effects between genders were examined.Results-Social camaraderie (SC) was the most frequently endorsed reason for drinking. Regression analyses controlling for previous drinking revealed that social reasons for drinking predicted alcohol-related problems among female students in both samples. Additionally, SC was significantly correlated with every drinking measure and problem measure at 1 month for females in both the adjudicated and the volunteer groups. Total drinks, drinking days, and heavy episodic drinking events correlated with SC for males in the adjudicated sample.Conclusions-For females, these results suggest a relationship between social reasons for drinking and alcohol-related consequences, which previous research has not identified. More research is needed to explore females' reasons for drinking, accompanying problems, and the underlying psychosocial traits associated with these reasons.Excessive drinking in the college context is associated with damaged property, poor class attendance, hangovers, trouble with authorities, injuries, and fatalities (Hingson et al., 2005;

BackgroundVeteran research has primarily been conducted with clinical samples and those already involved in health care systems, but much is to be learned about veterans in the community. Facebook is a novel yet largely unexplored avenue for recruiting veteran participants for epidemiological and clinical studies.ObjectiveIn this study, we utilized Facebook to recruit a sample of young adult veterans for the first phase of an online alcohol intervention study. We describe the successful Facebook recruitment process, including data collection from over 1000 veteran participants in approximately 3 weeks, procedures to verify participation eligibility, and comparison of our sample with nationally available norms.MethodsParticipants were young adult veterans aged 18-34 recruited through Facebook as part of a large study to document normative drinking behavior among a large community sample of veterans. Facebook ads were targeted toward young veterans to collect information on demographics and military characteristics, health behaviors, mental health, and health care utilization.ResultsWe obtained a sample of 1023 verified veteran participants over a period of 24 days for the advertising price of approximately US $7.05 per verified veteran participant. Our recruitment strategy yielded a sample similar to the US population of young adult veterans in most demographic areas except for race/ethnicity and previous branch of service, which when we weighted the sample on race/ethnicity and branch a sample better matched with the population data was obtained. The Facebook sample recruited veterans who were engaged in a variety of risky health behaviors such as binge drinking and marijuana use. One fourth of veterans had never since discharge been to an appointment for physical health care and about half had attended an appointment for service compensation review. Only half had attended any appointment for a mental health concern at any clinic or hospital. Despite more than half screening positive for current probable mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, only about 1 in 3 received mental health care in the past year and only 1 in 50 received such care within the past month.ConclusionsThis work expands on the work of other studies that have examined clinical samples of veterans only and suggests Facebook can be an adequate method of obtaining samples of veterans in need of care.Trial RegistrationClinicaltrials.gov NCT02187887; http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02187887 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6YiUKRsXY).