A Toast to Nature

This topic submitted by Sarah Ambrose, Ben Erskine, John Lee, Dan Tomita ( willeatsmallchildren@hotmail.com ) on 10/9/03 .

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

Sarah Ambrose
Ben Erskine
John Lee
Dan Tomita

A TOAST TO NATURE

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) 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) The articles ÒSocial Bond Theory and Binge Drinking Among College StudentsÓ (Keith F. Durkin et. al), ÒBinge Drinking Remains Prevalent on College Campuses,Ó and ÒNIAAA Report on College Drinking,Ó 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.
Natural Systems Survey

SURVEY

1. Sex Male Female

2. Previous Location 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

Methods
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
On our day of presentation we plan to first come into class and present the class with our survey. Each person will be handed an individual copy of the survey, and told to fill it out individually and anonymously. After allowing everyone a few minutes to complete the survey, we will collect and quickly tally the results. From here our presentation could go two ways, the data from the class could correspond with our overall data, or it could show different results. This will not play a role in our results, but will prompt good conversation to initiate the discussion about our research.
After an interesting introductory discussion involving our larger scale results and the results from our class we will lecture about our results. We will discuss them by acting out the three or four most common results. Then we will talk about the other kinds of people that we discovered through our research and we will connect them to the results from the classroom survey.
Finally we will discuss our predictions, how they compared to our results, and how we came up with our predictions. After an enlightening and enthusiastic discussion, we will end our class with some friendly banter over glasses of sparkling cider and a Òtoast to nature.Ó

Results
We will gather our data and our results will be displayed on our data tables. We will also create an abbreviated data sheet that shows the numbers of various types of people and their present drinking habits. Our results will give us the information we need to refute or accept our hypothesis.

Conclusion
We will come to our conclusion by looking at our results very carefully and then comparing those results to our hypothesis. Our conclusion will summarize the data that we found, and will reveal the patterns that are present among the drinking habits of students at Miami. Hopefully our conclusions will be significant (with a P value of less .15), and will also be interesting.

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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