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This study used content analysis techniques to explore 221 first-year college women’s perceptions of female peers’ reasons (i.e., normative perceptions) for hooking up. Data on personal participation in hooking up were also collected. The well-established Drinking Motives Questionnaire (Cooper, 1994) was used as a framework for coding positive (enhancement or social) and negative (coping or conformity) normative hookup motivations. Participants most commonly indicated that enhancement reasons motivated peers’ hookup behaviors (69.7%). Coping (23.5%), external (21.7%), social (19.5%), and conformity (16.3%) motives were cited less frequently. Furthermore, women who had hooked up since matriculating into college (61.5%, n = 136) were significantly more likely to state that their female peers hook up for enhancement reasons (a positive motive), but they were significantly less likely to perceive that typical female peers hook up for coping or conformity reasons (negative motives) (ps < .001). Findings indicate not only that college women uphold overwhelmingly positive perceptions for peers’ hooking up, but there appears to be a strong relationship between college women’s own hooking up participation and the positive versus negative attributions they ascribe to hooking up among their peers. This study extends the understanding of college women’s perceptions and potential influences of hooking up and provides implications for harm reduction efforts.

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Learning communities have increasingly become a mechanism for education reform in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Recognizing that learning occurs both inside and outside the classroom, their emergence is partly a response to the critique that undergraduate education at American research universities lacks integrated and focused student learning (Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, 1998;Pike, 1999). In other words, the typical college experience for many students is a solitary one, with each student selecting and taking separate, often disconnected courses; living in dormitories with peers who may or may not share career or intellectual interests; and engaging in extracurricular activities that are likewise disconnected from what is occurring in the classroom and in the dorm. Within higher education, learning communities allow for integration of students' academic (or intellectual) and social experiences-with the idea that ultimately such an integration enhances academic performance, engagement, and retention (Li, McCoy, Shelley, and Whalen, 2005).Since their emergence in educational settings, learning communities as a means of integrating students' academic and social experiences have taken a number of forms: as structures inside classrooms that facilitate student learning of particular skills or content areas through collaborations This chapter describes the Psychology Early Awareness Program (PEAP) at Loyola Marymount University, a residential learning community centered within a discipline. We discuss the theory that supports the value of living-learning communities, describe how this guided the development of PEAP, and summarize the benefits of this approach.