Predictors of college students' alcohol consumption: implications for student education

Understanding why young adults consume alcohol the way they do can lead to more effective educational programming for promotion of students' personal health and safety. The authors examined the predictive role of expectations about alcohol, perceived peer norms of consumption, awareness of rules, and individual self-efficacy in conjunction with demographic variables for male and female college students' weekly alcohol consumption. The sample of 4,960 students analyzed here is 10 to 20 times larger and more nationally representative than the samples used in similar studies. The authors used a general linear model; 41% of the men's variance and 33% of the women's variance in self-reported weekly alcohol consumption were explained by the set of predictors. In descending order of variance accounted for in male and female students' self-reported weekly alcohol consumption, perceived gender-specific norms of consumption, expectations about the effects of alcohol, and the importance of drinking in high school were significant predictors for both men and women. The salience of psychological variables for young adults' consumption of alcohol underscores the importance of recognizing individual predictors of behavior in the broader ecological context in which those behaviors are performed.