Sex and Drinking Patterns: An Old Relationship Revisited in a New Way

This paper investigates the nature of sex differences in drinking motives and behavior within a stratified random sample from the Champaign-Urbana community (N=385). Discriminant analysis is used to pinpoint which independent drinking variables differentiated most powerfully between the sexes, as well as to measure the importance of sex differences in drinking relative to age, student status, and marital status group differences. The findings indicate that despite some sex differences in drinking patterns, the drinking variables displayed their greatest discriminatory power on each of the other three demographic group variables. Compared to age, student status, or marital status differences, drinking differences between women and men appeared relatively minor. Throughout the paper the authors stress the utility of multivariate discriminant analysis for the investigation of group differences in sociological research.