College Student Alcohol Consumption, Day of the Week, and Class Schedule

The High Prevalence of problematic alcohol use on college campuses is well documented (Johnston et al., 2004; Presley and Cashin, 1996; Wechsler et al., 2000), as are the associated health-related negative consequences experienced by college students, which include death (Hingson et al., 2002), hangover and blackouts (Perkins, 2002), driving under the influence (Presley and Cashin, 1996), high-risk sexual behavior (Desiderato and Crawford, 1995), assault (Hingson et al., 2005; Presley and Cashin, 1996), and the development of alcohol-use disorders (Knight et al., 2002). Because of the pervasive and pernicious nature of problematic college alcohol use, understanding the etiology of and developing solutions for problem drinking on college campuses is of importance to college administrators, health professionals, and alcohol researchers. Research on problematic drinking during college has identified several individual-level, as well as environmental-level factors that place students at risk. Individual-level risk factors include being male (O’Malley and Johnston, 2002), drinking heavily before college (Wechsler et al., 1995), being involved in the fraternity or sorority (Greek) system (Engs et al., 1996), having lower levels of academic preparation, and poor performance on precollege assessments of cognitive ability and academic aptitude (Wood et al., 2002). Environmental-level risk factors for problematic drinking in college students include the social, or partying, environment at the college (Maggs, 1997), the degree to which alcohol is readily available and affordable (Chaloupka and Wechsler, 1996; Wechsler et al., 2000), and factors such as geographic region (Wechsler et al., 1994) and type of academic institution (Presley et al., 2002). Interventions aimed at reducing the college alcohol problem often reflect an awareness of the multiple risk factors involved. Recently, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) evaluated college-drinking interventions and subsequently proposed a list of recommended strategies (NIH Task Force of the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2002a, 2002b). This list includes interventions shown to be effective with college students (e.g., motivational enhancement interventions) and interventions shown to be effective with the general population but that could be applied to the college setting (e.g., increased enforcement of minimum drinking age laws). In addition, the task force recommended several promising strategies for use with college students (e.g., increasing enforcement at campus-based events that promote excessive drinking; consistently enforcing campus disciplinary actions associated with policy violations). One such strategy cited by the task force is to reduce “Thursday night partying” on college campuses by “reinstating Friday classes and exams” (p. 21). This strategy of curtailing weekend-like drinking on Thursdays by re-including Friday as an integral part of the academic week also has caught the attention of college administrators who have been considering the value of “reclaiming Friday” (Young, 2003). Although the existence of weekend-like drinking on Thursdays (often called “thirsty Thursday”) on college campuses, as well as the hypothesized role of Friday class schedule in the phenomenon have been widely discussed, these issues have received little attention in the research literature. We are aware of only 2 studies that touched on the issue of Thursday drinking, both of which examined data gathered predominantly from college freshmen (Del Boca et al., 2004; Paschall et al., 2006). Del Boca and colleagues provided evidence for a “thirsty-Thursday” phenomenon among college freshmen and found weekend-like drinking on Thursdays to be stable across the freshman year. Because Del Boca and colleagues focused primarily on weekly alcohol consumption across the freshman academic year, they dealt only briefly with day-of-the-week drinking and not at all with the role of Friday class schedule. These day-of-the-week findings are also limited by characteristics of the sample, most notably the oversampling of at-risk individuals with a positive family history of alcoholism. Paschall et al. (2006), by contrast, examined patterns of typical daily consumption of alcohol in a predominantly freshman sample of New Zealand college students with the goals of examining whether heavy-drinking students were more or less likely to subsequently enroll in Friday classes and whether scheduling at least one Friday class reduced the likelihood of heavy drinking on Thursday. They found evidence that heavy-drinking students were less likely to subsequently enroll in classes that convene on Friday. When examining the effects of scheduled Friday classes, they found a bivariate association between having no Friday class and past-month alcohol consumption or heavy-drinking episodes in the past month, but found no relation when logistic and multiple regressions of second semester consumption were calculated, which included first-semester drinking behavior. They did, however, find evidence that having no Friday classes increased the probability of Thursday being the heaviest drinking day of the week. As Paschall and colleagues note, these data examined only the presence/absence of Friday classes and not the timing of Friday classes. Thus, although some documentation of the thirsty-Thursday phenomenon exists, systematic, prospective research is needed to document the degree of the phenomenon across the undergraduate years and to ascertain whether the effect is more pronounced for known at-risk subpopulations. In addition, because only one prior published study has directly addressed how students’ class schedule on Friday relates to Thursday drinking behavior, more research is needed to assess directly the magnitude of this effect and to evaluate whether this effect varies as a function of other known risk factors for collegiate alcohol consumption. The present paper, therefore, has 3 primary goals. The first is to provide direct information about college students’ Thursday drinking patterns by examining both the prevalence and quantity of drinking on Thursday relative to the other days of the week. The second goal is to assess whether the presence and timing of a beginning class on Friday are related to Thursday drinking after controlling for relevant confounders (e.g., prior drinking patterns, Greek involvement). The third is to identify whether certain subgroups are more vulnerable to class schedule effects on drinking; that is, to assess whether risk factors for problematic drinking moderate the magnitude of the Friday class effect on Thursday drinking. In this paper, we will explore how 3 specific risk factors of participant sex, Greek involvement, and precollege heavy drinking behavior interact with Friday class schedule to predict Thursday drinking.