A Toast to Nature

This topic submitted by Sarah Ambrose, Ben Erskine, John Lee, Dan Tomita ( willeatsmallchildren@hotmail.com ) on 12/15/03 .

Natural Systems 1 Syllabus---Western Program---Miami University

Sarah Ambrose
Ben Erskine
John Lee
Dan Tomita

A TOAST TO NATURE
Abstract:
Our experiment tried to find a correlation between where students lived in high school and their drinking in college. We hypothesized that males from rural areas would drink the most in college and urban females would drink the least. We handed out surveys making sure to get a balance of western and main campus students for our data but found that there were not enough subjects from rural or urban areas to get a sufficient sampling for out t-test and failed to prove our hypothesis. A similar hypothesis focusing on family psychology rather than environment would most likely yield a better experiment.

Question:
To what extent does the hometown environment of a freshman student at Miami University, how much they drank prior to coming to college, and whether they live on Western Campus or Main Campus, affect the amount they currently drink?
Hypothesis:
We predict that males who come from rural environments that have already drunk in high school, that live on main campus, will be the biggest drinkers. We also predict that females from urban settings, that reside on Western Campus, who have not drunk before will have the most drastic change in behavior.
Introduction:
As stated in the article, ÒEnvironmental Predictors of Heavy Episodic Drinking,Ó by John D. Clapp, and Audrey M. Shillington, the prevalence of heavy episodic drinking among college students in the United States is moderately high. As newly arrived college students, freshmen are faced with the decision to drink, and if they decide to, they must decide the extent of their alcohol consumption. There are many factors that influence this decision and the extent to which it is made, but we have decided to focus our research on two main aspects: environment (high school and college), and gender. We are hoping to acquire significantly different data for students that came from rural versus urban versus suburban, between students that have previous drinking experience, and the gender of the individuals. ÒDemographically, men, more educated respondents, Catholics, and respondents residing in heavy drinking areas were more likely to report drinking heavily across drinking contexts." (John D. Clapp 2000) This supports our hypothesis that men coming from rural backgrounds tend to be heavier drinkers because there are higher chances that rural areas are places of heavier drinking. Not only the fact that rural areas are places of heavier drinking but also due to the lack activities students are more inclined to start experimenting with alcohol at earlier ages in their lives. And according to ÒEarly age of first drunkenness as a factor in college students' unplanned and unprotected sex attributable to drinking:Ó ÒStarting to drink at younger ages has been associated with heavier drinking patterns later in life.Ó (Ralph Hingson 2003) The articles ÒSocial Bond Theory and Binge Drinking Among College StudentsÓ (Keith F. Durkin et. al 1999), ÒBinge Drinking Remains Prevalent on College Campuses,Ó (2002) and ÒNIAAA Report on College Drinking,Ó (2002) all also support the idea that drinking alcohol remains a large part of college life.
The amount a student drinks in high school is also indicative of how much they drink while in college. In the article, ÒHarvard Study Finds Continued ÔBinge Drinking,ÕÓ the researchers found that students said ÒÉfewer (students) recall drinking to excess while in high school. Yet "binge drinking" on college campuses is still as common as it was in the early 1990s...Ó The idea that high school and college drinking are connected is also reinforced by the research of Jiang Yu and Robin W. Shacket in their article titled ÒAlcohol Use in High School: Predicting StudentsÕ Alcohol Use and Alcohol Problems in Four-Year Colleges.Ó They hypothesized that, Òbecause most students start using alcohol before entering college, the college environment tends to intensify students' alcohol use patterns formed in high school.Ó
Another article that enforces theories about drinking habits in college students is ÒThe Hidden Consequences of College Drinking,Ó which discusses the fact that ÒÉthe first 6 weeks of the first semester are critical to a first-year student's academic success. Because many students initiate heavy drinking during these early days of college, the potential exists for excessive alcohol consumption to interfere with successful adaptation to campus life.Ó The drinking patterns that freshmen tend to follow are indicative not only of their high school drinking habits, but how their drinking will be for the rest of their college experience.
Regardless of the drinking habits, ÒThe Beer Institute reports that beer drinking among college freshmen is at a record low.Ó In the article ÒAlcohol Abuse declines among College Freshmen,Ó the University of California reported that ÒÉthe percentage of college freshmen who report drinking beer frequently or occasionally during the past year is down to 48.3%, a record low.Ó Although our study will not focus on year-to-year findings and comparisons, it could be interesting to do the same study in future years and compare the findings.

Methods
Our main method will consist of an online survey that we will have freshmen students fill out an online survey that can be found at: http://www.users.muohio.edu/leejs1/homepage/survey.html
Anyone with an internet connection will be able to visit the site and the results from the survey will be sent to our e-mail inboxes. From there, we can simply tally the answers and organize them into our data sheets which will look like what is on the next page.
SURVEY

1. Sex Male Female

2. Hometown Urban (in city) Suburban Rural

3. Present Location Main Western

4. Did you drink in high school? Yes No

POLL

Current Average Alcohol Consumption (NIGHTS PER WEEK)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Average Alcohol Consumption During High School (NIGHTS PER WEEK)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Average Drinks Per Night (1 Drink = 1 Shot = 1 Beer = 1 glass of wine etc.)

1-3 4-6 7-9 10-12 13-15 15-18 18+

Why do you drink? (PLEASE ANSWER IN 3-4 SENTENCES)

TIMELINE
Present-End of Week (Oct. 8-11)
Continue planning final details of lab. Finish setting up website online and fine-tune survey and website set-up.
Next Week (Oct. 12-18)
Begin having friends and acquaintances go to the website and take the survey.
Week of October 19-25
Print out fliers about the website asking students to go it and take part in the survey. Distribute them around campus. Email the link to the website to different list-serves as well. Basically concentrate on publicizing the website and experiment and getting as many people to participate as possible.
In case of low response amounts on the website, we plan to conduct informal verbal interviews asking the same questions and noting the responses.
End of October through beginning of November
Analyze data. Finish interviewing freshmen and recording data. Go through all data and make graphs and tables of our findings.
End of November
Begin lab write-up. Go through final data, finalize graphs and tables. Check in Peer Science Center with tutors to make sure everything is done the correct way.

Our Presentation
The presentation will begin with a short introduction discussing why we chose to study this topic and interesting finds so far concerning out hypothesis. To give the class a grasp on our methods we gave them the same surveys we asked the subjects to fill out and also had them analyze surveys in groups. The goal was to see if the class could also spot any trends in the results of our data.
Once the introduction of our project is done we will discuss the results that we discovered and compare them with the analysis that the class made. The class could possibly offer more insight into the results of our data. Once the discussion of the results is over, we will lighten the mood with a game.
Following the discussion will be a game of flip cup. Flip cup is a popular drinking game where two teams standoff in a relay race. Two teams stand across from each other, with each member filling a cup with a small amount of beer (which we will substitute using water). At the same time, opposing team members that are directly across from each must first drink the contents of the cup and proceed to flip the cup by placing it right-side up at the edge of the table and tapping it so that it lands upside down and stable. Once that is done, the next person in line goes and this process repeats until the entire line has followed suit. The team to do this first wins. We will have prizes for the team that wins and that will conclude the presentation.
Discussion and Conclusion
The p-values were unable to reject the nul hypothesis. The differences in the data we gathered showed to be insignificant. What this told us is that we needed better data to corroborate with our hypothesis. The problem that we ran into in gathering the data was that not enough of the population we sampled, Miami students, came from urban or even rural areas. Our attempts in finding balanced data were unsuccessful even after looking in other dorms like Dodds Hall and Emerson Hall. We could not find enough subjects from rural or urban areas to help us find a correlation between pre-college environment and college drinking.
If we were to do our research again we would start with a new hypothesis because the population at Miami has too much in common with each other to reach a concrete correlation in drinking and previous environment. Instead of focusing on rural, urban or suburban environments, we could shift the focus to psychological factors. Taking family into account instead of environment would offer more viable data top research upon. We would ask whether or not the drinking habits of the parents affected the drinking habits of the student and whether or not there was any psychological and/or physical abuse was involved in the decision to drink. We feel that, since everyone deals with different situations in growing up, we can find a pattern that correlates with drinking as a form of escapism and it would be more insightful than research as to where they lived in high school.

Bibliography

ÒAlcohol abuse declines among college freshmen.(according to study by University of California)Ó Modern Brewery Age. March 5 2001.
AP. ÒHarvard Study finds Continued ÔBinge DrinkingÕÓ Modern Brewery Age. April 8 2002.
Bennett, Melanie E. et al. ÒDrinking, Binge Drinking, and Other Drug Use Among Southwestern Undergraduates: Three-Year Trends.Ó American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. May 1 1999.
ÒBinge Drinking Remains Prevalent on College Campuses.Ó AORN Journal. June 1 2002.
Clapp, John D. et al. ÒEnvironmental Predictors of Heavy Episodic DrinkingÓ American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. May 1 2001.
Clapp, John D. et al. ÒDeconstructing Contexts of Binge Drinking Among College StudentsÓ American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. February 1 2000.
Durkin, Keith F. et al. ÒSocial Bond Theory and Binge Drinking among College Students: A Multivariate AnalysisÓ College Student Journal. September 1 1999.
Hingson, Ralph et al. ÒEarly age of first drunkenness as a factor in college students' unplanned and unprotected sex attributable to drinking.Ó Pediatrics. January 1 2003.
Preboth, Monica. ÒNIAAA Report on Prevention of College DrinkingÓ American Family Physician. June 15 2002.
ÒThe Hidden Consequences of College Drinking; Fall Semester is a Critical Time for Parents to Discuss the Risks With First-year Students.Ó PR Newswire. August 28 2002.
Yu, Jiang et al. ÒAlcohol use in high school: predicting students' alcohol use and alcohol problems in four-year colleges.Ó American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. November 1 2001.

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