Hook 'em horns and heavy drinking: Alcohol use and collegiate sports

Abstract

Heavy alcohol consumption has been associated with collegiate sporting events, but little is known about specific levels of consumption over the course of an entire sports season. Ongoing web-based daily-monitoring at the University of Texas at Austin allowed assessment of drinking levels of students (n = 541) over two full football seasons. High-profile football game days were among the heaviest days for alcohol consumption, comparable to consumption on other well-known drinking days such as New Years Eve and Halloween weekend. Men increased their drinking for all games, and women with greater social involvement were more likely to drink heavily during away games. Among lighter drinkers, away games were associated with a greater likelihood of behavioral risks as intoxication increased.Emerging adult college students are among the heaviest drinking demographic groups in the United States. Those who attend college consume considerably more alcohol than their noncollege peers (Johnston, O'Malley, Bachman, & Schulenberg, 2005), and they experience high rates of negative consequences associated with excessive alcohol use (Wechsler, et al., 2002). Although examination of typical and peak consumption patterns can shed light on general patterns of college drinking, traditional assessments of alcohol consumption such as Quantity/Frequency indices (e.g., the Daily Drinking Questionnaire; Collins, Parks, & Marlatt, 1985) have significant limitations (e.g., . Such assessments require students to rely on heuristically-based estimates of "typical" consumption patterns, and are therefore unlikely to capture drinking episodes that are outside of individuals' normative consumption patterns.Recent evidence suggests that collegiate drinking, and heavy drinking in particular, is often associated with specific social or recreational events within the college environment. Although these events may represent college students' heaviest drinking occasions, they are likely to be excluded by traditional quantity/frequency assessments of alcohol use. Thus, the identification of events that promote heavy drinking, the degree to which alcohol use increases in conjunction with these events, and factors that influence drinking during these events, has become a recent focus of empirical research. For example, although it has widely been considered a period of sustained heavy drinking for many students, only recently has drinking on Spring Break been empirically documented as a specific heavy drinking context (Lee, Maggs, & Rankin, 2006;Smeaton, Josiam, & Dietrich, 1998). Likewise, Halloween (Miller, Jasper, & Hill, 1993) hasPublisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errorsmaybe discovered which could affe...

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