Perceptions of Binge Drinking as Problematic among College Students.

INTRODUCTION Excessive drinking is a well-acknowledged problem on college campuses in America. National studies have shown that a large majority of college students consume alcohol, even though most of them are under the legal drinking age. More than 40% of college students are considered binge drinkers, which is defined by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as consuming five or more drinks within about 2 hours for men and four or more drinks within about 2 hours for women (2004). Risks associated with heavy alcohol consumption include alcohol poisoning, rape and assault, blackouts, car accidents, unintentional injury and academic failure (McBride, Barrett, Moore, & Schonfeld, 2014). Nearly 25% of college students reported missed classes, incomplete assignments and poor grades caused by their drinking behaviors, and 33% of students lost at least three to five hours of productive time due to recovering from drinking (Yaccarino, 2001; Dotson, Dunn & Bowers, 2015). When students go to college, they find themselves in a novel environment. They are usually away from parents and high school friends for the first time and are faced with many new situations. Students have more autonomy than ever before, and they are not allowed much time for this adjustment. Within this context, students often make decisions contrary to their established knowledge of right and wrong and this may be referred to as moral disengagement. Moral disengagement is categorized by the tendency to separate from moral self-control that would generally govern one's behavior (Newton, Andrews, Champion, & Teeson, 2014). College students are able to suspend their morals as a way to justify their negative behavior. Another way in which students may justify their behavior is through their perception of social norms and influences. Acceptance of alcohol consumption and binge drinking is an identifiable feature of college culture as alcohol use is often perceived as a rite of passage for college students and is often a response to peer pressure (Ward, Galante, Trivedi & Kahrs, 2015; Yaccarino, 2001). Students who feel that alcohol is important to their college experience will participate in more frequent and intense binge drinking behaviors (Ward et al., 2015). Furthermore, students reason that the majority of their peers engage in drinking behaviors and believe that their peers see non-drinkers as non-sociable, which also influences their own decisions and beliefs (Jackson, Walling, & Thompson, 2007; Conroy, Sparks & Visser, 2015). PURPOSE/IMPORTANCE With the popularity of alcohol consumption continuing to increase, society recognizes this as a serious problem among college students. The significance of this study lies in the potential to better understand, and thus, more effectively decrease binge drinking behaviors among college students. This study will look at college drinking from the framework of Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory. However, this study will focus on two specific aspects of the theory, namely moral disengagement and modeling. Through a better understanding, it is more likely that effective prevention and intervention efforts can be formulated in order to decrease the behavior. This study investigates a relationship between participation in the behavior of binge drinking and moral disengagement among college students. The purpose of this study is to better understand why college students engage in binge drinking behaviors. By looking at the theory of moral disengagement as a possible means of more fully describing the acceptance of this behavior among college students there is potential to reveal the reasoning behind this behavior. This study also explores the potential influence of the role that social norms and peer pressure play in students' binge drinking behaviors. LITERATURE REVIEW Recent trends suggest that alcohol is being consumed at earlier ages than in the past, with one of the most affected populations of alcohol abuse currently being college aged adults. …