Gender Differences in Collegiate Alcohol Use

Using a survey of 808 male and female college students at a medium-sized state university in the Deep South, this study compared the drinking behavior of, and the social mechanisms leading to alcohol use, in the two gender groups. The results show that males are more likely than females to drink to intoxication. Three main factors can account for this difference. First, males are more likely than females to be associated with others who present prodrinking norms and drinking models. Second, females are more likely to be affected by their parents, and association with parents' more restrictive norms results in less favorable alcohol-use definitions among females, and, in turn, a lower level of alcohol use. Third, peer drinking norms, which are more permissive, exert a stronger impact on male definitions of alcohol use and level of intoxication than on female definitions.