Students underestimate alcohol intake
By Sanjit Bagchi Calcutta
University students underestimate their drinking habits, according to a recent study.1 The team of researchers from Duke University Medical Center found that the majority of the 106 students they interviewed overestimated a single beer, mixed drink, or shot.
Aaron White, one of the authors, said, "We asked students to pour different types of drinks into cups of various sizes. We found that, in most cases, students are way too liberal in their definitions of single servings of alcohol. Regardless of which type of drink we asked students to pour, they almost always poured too much."
RICHARD YOUNG/REX
According to White, the study has raised questions about the validity of widely used alcohol surveys and has implications for future surveys on alcohol intake in students. He said, "Most of what we know about college drinking comes from survey data. For some reason, we've all just sort of assumed that we can take students' responses at face value--that if they say they had three drinks then they really had three drinks. This study suggests that it's just not that simple. In fact, if a student tells us they had three drinks, there's a good chance it was more like five or six. This is a big difference, particularly if we're trying to sort students into categories like 'binge drinker' and 'non-binge drinker' based on their self reported drinking habits."
White also stressed that extra effort should be placed on educating students about the alcohol content of standard drinks: "We somehow need to teach students, health educators, administrators, and anyone else involved in dealing with college drinking issues, how to accurately define a drink. Until then, we have to be cautious about the conclusions that we draw from survey data and about the levels of consumption that we promote to college students as 'safe' or 'normal.'"
studentBMJ 2004;12:1-44 February ISSN 0966-6494
- White AM, Kraus CL, McCracken LA, Swartzwelder HS. Do college students drink more than they think? Use of a free-pour paradigm to determine how college students define standard drinks. Alcohol Clin Exp Res 2003;27:1750-6.
