Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Jul;72(4):622-32.
doi: 10.15288/jsad.2011.72.622.

Alcohol use and related problems among college students and their noncollege peers: the competing roles of personality and peer influence

Patrick D Quinn  1 , Kim Fromme
Affiliations

Alcohol use and related problems among college students and their noncollege peers: the competing roles of personality and peer influence

Patrick D Quinn et al. J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2011 Jul.

Abstract

Objective: Although alcohol use and related problems are highly prevalent in emerging adulthood overall, college students drink somewhat more than do their peers who do not attend college. The personal or social influences underlying this difference, however, are not yet well understood. The present study examined whether personality traits (i.e., self-regulation and sensation seeking) and peer influence (i.e., descriptive drinking norms) contributed to student status differences.

Method: At approximately age 22, 4-year college students (n = 331) and noncollege emerging adults (n = 502) completed web-based surveys, including measures of alcohol use, alcohol-related problems, personality, and social norms.

Results: College students drank only slightly more heavily. This small difference, however, reflected personality suppression. College students were lower in trait-based risk for drinking, and accounting for traits revealed a stronger positive association between attending college and drinking more heavily. Although noncollege emerging adults reported greater descriptive drinking norms for social group members, norms appeared to more strongly influence alcohol use among college students. Finally, despite drinking less, noncollege individuals experienced more alcohol-related problems.

Conclusions: The association between attending college and drinking heavily may be larger than previously estimated, and it may be masked by biased selection into college as a function of both self-regulation and sensation seeking. Differing patterns of alcohol use, its predictors, and its consequences emerged for the college and noncollege samples, suggesting that differing intervention strategies may best meet the needs of each population.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Mean alcohol use and alcohol-related problems scores for college and noncollege participants, controlling for demographics, personality, and—for alcohol-related problems—alcohol use. Bars represent standard errors. ***p < .001.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Association between gender-specific social group descriptive drinking norms and alcohol use among college students and noncollege emerging adults, controlling for demographics and personality
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Agrawal A, Grant JD, Littlefield A, Waldron M, Pergadia ML, Lyn-skey MT, Heath AC. Developing a quantitative measure of alcohol consumption for genomic studies on prospective cohorts. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. 2009;70:157–168. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Arnett JJ. Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. The American Psychologist. 2000;55:469–480. - PubMed
    1. Bachman JG, O'Malley PM, Schulenberg JE, Johnston LD, Bryant AL, Merline AC. The decline of substance use in young adulthood: Changes in social activities, roles, and beliefs. Mah-wah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 2002.
    1. Bachman JG, O'Malley PM, Schulenberg JE, Johnston LD, Freed-man-Doan P, Messersmith EE. The education-drug use connection: How successes and failures in school relate to adolescent smoking, drinking, drug use, and delinquency. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group/Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 2008.
    1. Bachman JG, Wadsworth KN, O'Malley PM, Johnston LD. Smoking, drinking, and drug use in young adulthood: The impacts of new freedoms and new responsibilities. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 1997.

Publication types

MeSH terms